Abstract:
The 21st century has seen several infectious disease outbreaks that
have turned into epidemics and pandemics including Severe Acute
Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) which began in Asia in 2003 (Poon,
Guan, Nicholls, Yuen, & Peiris, 2004), followed by H1N1 that emerged
in Mexico and the United States (US) in 2009 (Belongia et al., 2010).
Next came the lesser known Middle East Respiratory Syndrome
(MERS) originating in Saudi Arabia in 2012 (Assiri et al., 2013), after
which the Ebola outbreak in West Africa took place from 2014–
2016, with a more recent occurrence in the Democratic Republic of
Congo from 2018–2019 (Malvy, McElroy, de Clerck, Günther, & van
Griensven, 2019). To date, the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak that
started in Wuhan, in the Hubei province of China, in late December
2019 seems to be eclipsing all of these previous infectious diseases
in terms of its global reach and impact (Wang, Horby, Hayden, &
Gao, 2020). After being declared by the World Health Organization
(WHO) as a public health emergency on 30 January 2020 (World
Health Organization, 2020c), it was elevated to a pandemic status
on 11 March 2020 (World Health Organization, 2020d). As of 28
April 2020, there are more than 2.9 million cases and 202,597 deaths
reported worldwide (World Health Organization, 2020b).
Healthcare workers around the world, for example nurses, medical doctors and community healthcare workers are on the front lines
caring for those infected (Zhang, Sun, Latour, Hu, & Qian, 2020),
whereas epidemiologists, public health officials, and others work
behind the scenes to control the spread of COVID-19 and protect
population health. Scientists across many disciplines are also researching how to address the myriad problems that this disease has
created and exacerbated, such as the shortage of personal protective equipment (Chughtai, Seale, Islam, Owais, & Macintyre, 2020),
the need for more critical care facilities and expertise (Grasselli,
Pesenti, & Cecconi, 2020), the development of therapeutics (Dhama
et al., 2020) and new vaccines that could prevent the virus in the future (Anderson, Heesterbeek, Klinkenberg, & Hollingsworth, 2020).
Nursing informaticians who use information technology to enhance
nursing education, clinical practice and policy are collaborating with
colleagues and contributing to and leading research and digital health
initiatives in the face of COVID-19. Here, we discuss some perspectives from nursing informaticians based in nine countries across
five regions of the world (Ronquillo, Topaz, Pruinelli, Peltonen, &
Nibber, 2017). We explain how the nursing informatics community is
responding to this global crisis and offer some early lessons learned
that could be useful in future outbreaks of infectious disease.
