How Technology Can Help Controlling COVID-19 Outbreak?

The new Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, which first emerged in China, have been affecting people, businesses and governments around the world. In order to reduce its devastating consequences, both prevention and treatment measurements must be pursued by involved sectors.

High-level politicians and medical staff, in turn, are striving to control the epidemic efficiently by adopting preventive strategies and providing urgent medical care, respectively. Meanwhile, computer scientists can play an essential role in predicting and controlling the infectious disease epidemic by analyzing a massive amount of data, whether real-time or historical, on disease spread.

Since multiple factors influence the pattern and speed of regional and global spread of COVID-19 virus, data analyzers need to work on diverse datasets, including flight itinerary, real-time climate conditions, animal and insect population and health system data. Consequently, data scientists can quantify the risk of exposure to the virus globally, by applying machine learning techniques, and especially big-data analyzing algorithms, on the gathered datasets.

“While disease spread fast, knowledge can spread faster.” – a slogan of BlueDot company. BlueDot is a company, aims at helping decision-makers to be prepared for infectious disease outbreaks. Dr Kamran Khan, founder of BlueDot, and his colleagues at BlueDot developed a global early warning system, which assesses the risk of infectious disease threat exposure in a location of interest and sends real-time alerts to clients. They create predictive models of where, when and how an outbreak will spread, by using Artificial Intelligence algorithms.

Emerging the fatal COVID-19 epidemic make the importance of incorporating new technologies in healthcare network more than ever. With the tremendous advancements in technology along with the power of the overwhelming amount of data generated by various data sources, data scientists can contribute enormously in predicting and controlling infectious diseases.