Understanding people's short- and long-distance travel patterns can inform economic development, urban planning, and responses to natural disasters, wars and conflicts, disease outbreaks like the COVID-19 pandemic, and more. A new global mapping method, developed by scientists from Boston Children's Hospital and the University of Oxford, provides global estimates of human mobility at much greater resolution than was possible before.

Despite physical distance, it's possible to create proximity between family members located in different places. This is according to a study from Linköping University that has investigated how video calls bring family members together. The results show that proximity in video calls is established mainly by way of the body and the senses, e.g. by giving a digital high five.

Researchers at King's College London, Massachusetts General Hospital and health science company ZOE have developed an artificial intelligence diagnostic that can predict whether someone is likely to have COVID-19 based on their symptoms. Their findings are published today in Nature Medicine.

Two new articles provide insights on the use of telehealth or virtual care in the age of COVID-19 and beyond, pointing to its value to not only prevent contagious diseases but also to provide access to effective and equitable care.

In a Nature Partner Journal's Digital Medicine perspective, Lee H. Schwamm, MD, Director of the Center for TeleHealth at Massachusetts General Hospital and Vice President of Virtual Care at Partners Healthcare, and his colleagues stress that virtual care, by collapsing the barriers of time and distance, is ideal for providing care that is patient-centered, lower cost, more convenient and with greater productivity than traditional methods for delivering care, especially during a pandemic.

Several drugs approved for treating hepatitis C viral infection were identified as potential candidates against COVID-19, a new disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. This is the result of research based on extensive calculations using the MOGON II supercomputer at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). One of the most powerful computers in the world,

A rapid increase in "virtual" visits during the COVID-19 pandemic could transform the way physicians provide care in the United States going forward, according to a new study led by researchers from NYU Grossman School of Medicine.

The findings, published online in the Journal of the American Informatics Association, captures the largest experience to date of the speed, scale and rapid expansion of video-enabled visits by patients and providers in varied and diverse settings.

As the UK government looks for an exit strategy to Britain's COVID-19 lockdown a nanomedicine expert from The University of Manchester believes a care model usually applied to cancer patients could provide a constructive way forward.

Kostas Kostarelos, is Professor of Nanomedicine at The University of Manchester and is leading the Nanomedicine Lab, which is part of the National Graphene Institute and the Manchester Cancer Research Centre.