Hyderabad: In times of COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown to contain the spread of infections, digital infrastructure needs to be strengthened to deal with the impact and future public health emergencies.
Integration of Artificial Intelligence should be done on priority and analysis of big data relating to citizen's movement can help in better quarantine monitoring. Further, the use of technology can be used to identify the clusters and viral vectors and help impose further prevention measures.
Cities across the world have made innovation in this regard to stay robust and anti-fragile during natural disasters and the same can be applied to a pandemic.
No disease in human history has travelled so quickly to so many places and have affected so many people. While the medical response to the disease is underway, it is limited to only 1-10% of the population.
In Kerala, call centres were opened to enhance contract tracing operations of COVID-19 suspects and AI-based app can be deployed to prepare detailed flowchart of travel history and match the suspects who have registered similar details with the ministry.
Multiple data points available within the government and state police database including face data, mobile phone trace and location can be used to extrapolate fine details using big data analysis.
Shortly after the outbreak of COVID-19 in China, Taiwan set up a National Health Command Center. The government has imposed restrictions on inbound and outbound travellers; identified the infected using Big Data. It curbed fake news being spread on social media. A database was created by combining the information like national health insurance policies, migrations, customs, hospital visits, QR codes of flight tickets.
People were alerted from time to time using AI algorithms. This made it easier for healthcare workers to track the travel history of patients. With the help of Big Data, the authorities were able to send the health status of individuals to border security guards. These health status messages served as passes. In areas where nCoV infections were highly prevalent, symptomatic patients were tracked and quarantined using mobile phone tracking.
BlueDot, a Canadian company was the first to warn about this coronavirus outbreak. Every day, this company’s AI bot sifts through millions of articles, news and blog posts published in 65 languages. It warned on December 31, 2019, that a deadly disease like SARS was about to break out in China’s Wuhan. This warning came nine days before the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a 'public health emergency'.
The BlueDot system had warned officials about an article in Mandarin that read 27 people suffered from severe pneumonia after visiting a wet market in Wuhan. BlueDot’s 40 employees include doctors, veterinarians, infectious disease specialists, data scientists and software developers. They analyze the articles published in 65 languages using Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. They get alerts if they find any signs of disease outbreaks. It was BlueDot which warned the US about the Zika virus spread from Brazil in 2016. About 80 per cent of the transactions in China are cashless. They are done through apps like Ali Pay and WeChat. The Chinese officials are using this data to constantly monitor the movement of its citizens, and taking immediate action.
Read: Defence ministry makes its own hand-held fever checking gun in fight against COVID-19
In the health sector, AI is already being used to detect lesions of pneumonia and to measure its volume, shape and density. This provides the doctor with data to assist doctors in making proper judgements and expedite the health evaluation of patients.
However, the question remains on the capacity issue of serves and cloud-providers as many are using digital devices in quarantine and a lot more are opting to work from home during the lockdown phase.
Some researchers and private entities along with their state governments are developing a digital platform similar to HealthMap, to visually represent the disease outbreak according to location, time and the type of spread.
The coronavirus pandemic has infected more than 9,35,957 and killed over 47,245 people across the world. Nearly 1,94,286 people have recovered so far.
The total number of coronavirus positive cases in India reached 1,834 on Wednesday, including foreign nationals, with 1,649 active cases, the Union Health Ministry said. Among the 27 states and Union Territories having coronavirus patients, Maharashtra has the highest tally of positive cases at 302, followed by Kerala at 241.
India has been under a 21-day lockdown in a bid to prevent the spread of coronavirus.
