Short- and Long-Term Predicted and Witnessed Consequences of Digital Surveillance During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Scoping Review.

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted the deployment of digital technologies for public health surveillance globally. The rapid development and use of these technologies have curtailed opportunities to fully consider their potential impacts (eg, for human rights, civil liberties, privacy, and marginalization of vulnerable groups). OBJECTIVE: We conducted a scoping review of peer-reviewed and gray literature to identify the types and applications of digital technologies used for surveillance during the COVID-19 pandemic and the predicted and witnessed consequences of digital surveillance. METHODS: Our methodology was informed by the 5-stage methodological framework to guide scoping reviews: identifying the research question; identifying relevant studies; study selection; charting the data; and collating, summarizing, and reporting the findings. We conducted a search of peer-reviewed and gray literature published between December 1, 2019, and December 31, 2020. We focused on the first year of the pandemic to provide a snapshot of the questions, concerns, findings, and discussions emerging from peer-reviewed and gray literature during this pivotal first year of the pandemic. Our review followed the PRISMA-ScR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Extension for Scoping Reviews) reporting guidelines. RESULTS: We reviewed a total of 147 peer-reviewed and 79 gray literature publications. Based on our analysis of these publications, we identified a total of 90 countries and regions where digital technologies were used for public health surveillance during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of the most frequently used technologies included mobile phone apps, location-tracking technologies, drones, temperature-scanning technologies, and wearable devices. We also found that the literature raised concerns regarding the implications of digital surveillance in relation to data security and privacy, function creep and mission creep, private sector involvement in surveillance, human rights, civil liberties, and impacts on marginalized groups. Finally, we identified recommendations for ethical digital technology design and use, including proportionality, transparency, purpose limitation, protecting privacy and security, and accountability. CONCLUSIONS: A wide range of digital technologies was used worldwide to support public health surveillance during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings of our analysis highlight the importance of considering short- and long-term consequences of digital surveillance not only during the COVID-19 pandemic but also for future public health crises. These findings also demonstrate the ways in which digital surveillance has rendered visible the shifting and blurred boundaries between public health surveillance and other forms of surveillance, particularly given the ubiquitous nature of digital surveillance. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): RR2-https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2021-053962.

A network community structure similarity index for weighted networks.

Identification of communities in complex systems is an essential part of network analysis. Accordingly, measuring similarities between communities is a fundamental part of analysing community structure in different, yet related, networks. Commonly used methods for quantifying network community similarity fail to consider the effects of edge weights. Existing methods remain limited when the two networks being compared have different numbers of nodes. In this study, we address these issues by proposing a novel network community structure similarity index (NCSSI) based on the edit distance concept. NCSSI is proposed as a similarity index for comparing network communities. The NCSSI incorporates both community labels and edge weights. The NCSSI can also be employed to assess the similarity between two communities with varying numbers of nodes. We test the proposed method using simulated data and case-study analysis of New York Yellow Taxi flows and compare the results with that of other commonly used methods (i.e., mutual information and the Jaccard index). Our results highlight how NCSSI effectively captures the impact of both label and edge weight changes and their impacts on community structure, which are not captured in existing approaches. In conclusion, NCSSI offers a new approach that incorporates both label and weight variations for community similarity measurement in complex networks.

An investigation of media reports of digital surveillance within the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a surge in digital public health surveillance worldwide, with limited opportunities to consider the effectiveness or impact of digital surveillance. The news media shape public understanding of topics of importance, contributing to our perception of priority issues. This study investigated news media reports published during the first year of the pandemic to understand how the use and consequences of digital surveillance technologies were reported on. Methods: A media content analysis of 34 high- to low-income countries was completed. The terms "COVID-19," "surveillance," "technologies," and "public health" were used to retrieve and inductively code media reports. Results: Of the 1,001 reports, most were web-based or newspaper sources on the development and deployment of technologies directed at contact tracing, enforcing quarantine, predicting disease spread, and allocating resources. Technology types included mobile apps, wearable devices, "smart" thermometers, GPS/Bluetooth, facial recognition, and security cameras. Repurposed data from social media, travel cards/passports, and consumer purchases also provided surveillance insight. Media reports focused on factors impacting surveillance success (public participation and data validity) and the emerging consequences of digital surveillance on human rights, function creep, data security, and trust. Discussion: Diverse digital technologies were developed and used for public health surveillance during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The use of these technologies and witnessed or anticipated consequences were reported by a variety of media sources worldwide. The news media are an important public health information resource, as media outlets contribute to directing public understanding and shaping priority public health surveillance issues. Our findings raise important questions around how journalists decide which aspects of public health crises to report on and how these issues are discussed.

A vision for incorporating human mobility in the study of human-wildlife interactions.

As human activities increasingly shape land- and seascapes, understanding human-wildlife interactions is imperative for preserving biodiversity. Habitats are impacted not only by static modifications, such as roads, buildings and other infrastructure, but also by the dynamic movement of people and their vehicles occurring over shorter time scales. Although there is increasing realization that both components of human activity substantially affect wildlife, capturing more dynamic processes in ecological studies has proved challenging. Here we propose a conceptual framework for developing a 'dynamic human footprint' that explicitly incorporates human mobility, providing a key link between anthropogenic stressors and ecological impacts across spatiotemporal scales. Specifically, the dynamic human footprint integrates a range of metrics to fully acknowledge the time-varying nature of human activities and to enable scale-appropriate assessments of their impacts on wildlife behaviour, demography and distributions. We review existing terrestrial and marine human-mobility data products and provide a roadmap for how these could be integrated and extended to enable more comprehensive analyses of human impacts on biodiversity in the Anthropocene.

Cysteine-Selective Modification of Peptides and Proteins via Desulfurative C-C Bond Formation.

The site-selective modification of peptides and proteins facilitates the preparation of targeted therapeutic agents and tools to interrogate biochemical pathways. Among the numerous bioconjugation techniques developed to install groups of interest, those that generate C(sp3 )-C(sp3 ) bonds are significantly underrepresented despite affording proteolytically stable, biogenic linkages. Herein, a visible-light-mediated reaction is described that enables the site-selective modification of peptides and proteins via desulfurative C(sp3 )-C(sp3 ) bond formation. The reaction is rapid and high yielding in peptide systems, with comparable translation to proteins. Using this chemistry, a range of moieties is installed into model systems and an effective PTM-mimic is successfully integrated into a recombinantly expressed histone.

Do regionally targeted lockdowns alter movement to non-lockdown regions? Evidence from Ontario, Canada.

Regionally targeted interventions are being used by governments to slow the spread of COVID-19. In areas where free movement is not being actively restricted, there is uncertainty about how effective such regionally targeted interventions are due to the free movement of people between regions. We use mobile-phone network mobility data to test two hypotheses: 1) do regions targeted by exhibit increased outflows into other regions and 2) do regions targeted by interventions increase outflows specifically into areas with lesser restrictions. Our analysis focuses on two well-defined regionally targeted interventions in Ontario, Canada the first intervention as the first wave subsided (July 17, 2020) and the second intervention as we entered into new restrictions during the onset of the second wave (November 23, 2020). We use a difference-in-difference model to investigate hypothesis 1 and an interrupted time series model to investigate hypothesis 2, controlling for spatial effects (using a spatial-error model) in both cases. Our findings suggest that there that the regionally targeted interventions had a neutral effect (or no effect) on inter-regional mobility, with no significant differences associated with the interventions. We also found that overall inter-regional mobility was associated with socio-economic factors and the distance to the boundary of the intervention region. These findings are important as they should guide how governments design regionally targeted interventions (from a geographical perspective) considering observed patterns of mobility.

Associations between mobility and socio-economic indicators vary across the timeline of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Covid-19 interventions are greatly affecting patterns of human mobility. Changes in mobility during Covid-19 have differed across socio-economic gradients during the first wave. We use fine-scale network mobility data in Ontario, Canada to study the association between three different mobility measures and four socio-economic indicators throughout the first and second wave of Covid-19 (January to December 2020). We find strong associations between mobility and the socio-economic indicators and that relationships between mobility and other socio-economic indicators vary over time. We further demonstrate that understanding how mobility has changed in response to Covid-19 varies considerably depending on how mobility is measured. Our findings have important implications for understanding how mobility data should be used to study interventions across space and time. Our results support that Covid-19 non-pharmaceutical interventions have resulted in geographically disparate responses to mobility and quantifying mobility changes at fine geographical scales is crucial to understanding the impacts of Covid-19.

An ALS-associated variant of the autophagy receptor SQSTM1/p62 reprograms binding selectivity toward the autophagy-related hATG8 proteins.

Recognition of human autophagy-related 8 (hATG8) proteins by autophagy receptors represents a critical step within this cellular quality control system. Autophagy impairment is known to be a pathogenic mechanism in the motor neuron disorder amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Overlapping but specific roles of hATG8 proteins belonging to the LC3 and GABARAP subfamilies are incompletely understood, and binding selectivity is typically overlooked. We previously showed that an ALS-associated variant of the SQSTM1/p62 (p62) autophagy receptor bearing an L341V mutation within its ATG8-interacting motif (AIM) impairs recognition of LC3B in vitro, yielding an autophagy-deficient phenotype. Improvements in understanding of hATG8 recognition by AIMs now distinguish LC3-interaction and GABARAP-interaction motifs and predict the effects of L341V substitution may extend beyond loss of function to biasing AIM binding preference. Through biophysical analyses, we confirm impaired binding of the L341V-AIM mutant to LC3A, LC3B, GABARAP, and GABARAPL1. In contrast, p62 AIM interactions with LC3C and GABARAPL2 are unaffected by this mutation. Isothermal titration calorimetry and NMR investigations provided insights into the entropy-driven GABARAPL2/p62 interaction and how the L341V mutation may be tolerated. Competition binding demonstrated reduced association of the L341V-AIM with one hATG8 manifests as a relative increase in association with alternate hATG8s, indicating effective reprogramming of hATG8 selectivity. These data highlight how a single AIM peptide might compete for binding with different hATG8s and suggest that the L341V-AIM mutation may be neomorphic, representative of a disease mechanism that likely extends into other human disorders.

Site-Selective Installation of Nϵ -Modified Sidechains into Peptide and Protein Scaffolds via Visible-Light-Mediated Desulfurative C-C Bond Formation.

Post-translational modifications (PTMs) enhance the repertoire of protein function and mediate or influence the activity of many cellular processes. The preparation of site-specifically and homogeneously modified proteins, to apply as tools to understand the biological role of PTMs, is a challenging task. Herein, we describe a visible-light-mediated desulfurative C(sp3 )-C(sp3 ) bond forming reaction that enables the site-selective installation of Nϵ -modified sidechains into peptides and proteins of interest. Rapid, operationally simple, and tolerant to ambient atmosphere, we demonstrate the installation of a range of lysine (Lys) PTMs into model peptide systems and showcase the potential of this technology by site-selectively installing an Nϵ Ac sidechain into recombinantly expressed ubiquitin (Ub).

Digital technology and disease surveillance in the COVID-19 pandemic: a scoping review protocol.

INTRODUCTION: Infectious diseases pose a risk to public health, requiring efficient strategies for disease prevention. Digital health surveillance technologies provide new opportunities to enhance disease prevention, detection, tracking, reporting and analysis. However, in addition to concerns regarding the effectiveness of these technologies in meeting public health goals, there are also concerns regarding the ethics, legality, safety and sustainability of digital surveillance technologies. This scoping review examines the literature on digital surveillance for public health purposes during the COVID-19 pandemic to identify health-related applications of digital surveillance technologies, and to highlight discussions of the implications of these technologies. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: The scoping review will be guided by the framework proposed by Arksey and O'Malley and the guidelines outlined by Colquhoun et al and Levac et al. We will search Medline (Ovid), PsycInfo, PubMed, Scopus, CINAHL (EBSCOhost), ACM Digital Library, Google Scholar and IEEE Explore for relevant studies published between December 2019 and December 2020. The review will also include grey literature. Data will be managed and analysed through an extraction table and thematic analysis. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: Findings will be disseminated through traditional academic channels, as well as social media channels and research briefs and infographics. We will target our dissemination to provincial and federal public health organisations, as well as technology companies and community-based organisations managing the public response to the COVID-19 pandemic.