When you are fighting with a pandemic, nothing matters as much as speed. A little-known hi-tech wizard and band of doctors say that they can find the vital speed that is needed for attacking the coronavirus. It is the computing power of artificial intelligence. They are calling their new weapon the “outbreak of science.” It can change the way we are fighting another contagion.
Moreover, it has already led to calls for an overhaul of how the federal government does things. Initially, we will take you inside BlueDot. BlueDot is a small Canadian company with an algorithm that scours the world for outbreaks of infectious disease. It is a digital system of early warning. It was among the first to raise alarms about that lethal outbreak.
BlueDot’s computer spat out an alert when it was New Year’s Eve. A business paper of China had just reported 27 cases of a mysterious flu-like disease in a city of 11 million, Wuhan. Moreover, the signs were threatening. There were seven people already in hospitals.
Moreover, most of the cases came from the market of the city’s sprawling sites. Thus, in the sprawling market, live animals are slaughtered on-site and packed in cages. Thus, the medical detectives investigate now if that is where the epidemic started when the virus leaped animals to us.
Doctor Kamran Khan is BlueDot’s found and CEO. Half a world away on the Toronto waterfront, he was on his way to work. As an infectious disease physician, he had seen another coronavirus 2003. That coronavirus was called SARS and killed three of his colleagues. When journalists talked with him, he said that he was worried about the outbreak.
BlueDot
He said that they did not know that will become the next pandemic. Nevertheless, he continued, that they knew that there were echoes of the outbreak of SARS. That was something worth paying attention to.
The novel COVID-19 soon had the world’s attention. Thus, now BlueDot’s Toronto staff works from hope, but no Dr. Khan. Nevertheless, the office kicked into high gear as they rushed to verify the alert in December.
Unfortunately, officials of China were secretive concerning what was happening. Nevertheless, BlueDot’s computer is not relying on official statements. Their algorithm was already churning throughout the data. It included livestock reports and medical bulletins. All these were to predict where the virus will move to next.
The computer scanned the data from 4,000 airports.
BlueDot was not only tracking flights but also calculating the cities at higher risk. Moreover, more than 800,000 travelers were leaving Wuhan on December 31. It is most likely that some of them were carrying the disease.
Doctor Kamran Khan says that they can visualize and analyze all the information across the globe in just a few seconds.
He added that the virus was not only just spreading to East Asia. Nonetheless, thousands of travelers were heading to the United States too.
Most of the travel came into Los Angeles, San Francisco, in California and into New York City. Let’s see how they will cope with the situation.
