Cytognomix Inc.

Published purpose

This project aims to find emerging sites of COVID19 clusters as early as possible to prevent further spread of these infections to uninfected persons. CYTOGNOMIX INC proposes a proactive approach to identify these locations using geostatistics to hone in on the most likely future hot-spots. Pinpointing these locations after community transmission would help with contact tracing of both symptomatic and asymptomatic infected persons. Early identification of hot-spots will allow self-isolation and more timely treatment of severe cases. CytoGnomix Inc. propose to apply geostatistical dosimetry methods that it has recently pioneered to assist governments to identify potential resurgence of infected individuals in the community in the current pandemic. These methods have been established as providing statistically valid analyses of spatiotemporal data for a wide spectrum of dynamic measurements for environmental, natural resource extraction, and health trends. CytoGnomix Inc have previously shown that these approaches can produce accurate maps of radiation exposed individuals after limited, strategic sampling of potentially exposed populations in the United States (Rogan PK et al. PLoS ONE 15(4): e0232008, 2020). This project will assess the utility of geostatistical techniques to identify geographic locations with asymmetric distributions and clusters of COVID-19 cases. It will implement a novel method to pinpoint emerging hot spots of new community transmission through changes in interpolated case counts over time. CytoGnomix Inc is partnering with the Ontario Institute of Evaluative and Clinical Sciences (IC/ES) to obtain access to the geographic COVID-19 daily incidence data and geostatistics software licenses. The Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care (MOHLTC) has agreed to be a knowledge user for this project. Using publicly available, county-level US count data, CytoGnomix Inc have already demonstrated to IC/ES and MOHLTC the feasibility of applying custom program scripts to automate these tasks.