foto referencial elhospital.com
Technology and the Covid-19
1-Decoding the virus
When the first SARS outbreak was detected in 2002, it took more than a year to sequence the virus's genome. Today, 18 years later, advances in sequencers not only allowed the cost of the process to decrease enormously, but also accelerated it: the coronavirus genome was sequenced less than a month after the first case was identified. Similarly, a laboratory in Singapore announced that it would launch a kit that would allow patients to be tested for three types of coronavirus in less than two hours.
2-Real-time tracking
Surveillance tools developed from artificial intelligence algorithms take data from news, forums, blogs, and public health agencies to warn their clients of potential outbreaks of diseases like coronavirus. For example, a Canadian health monitoring company alerted to the start of the epidemic on December 31, 2019, 10 days before the World Health Organization issued the first official statement on the coronavirus.
At the same time, the company correctly predicted that the virus would travel from Wuhan to Bangkok, Seoul, Taipei and Tokyo in the following days. Of course, this technology also allows the progress of the coronavirus to be followed in real time, as can be seen on the interactive map developed by the Center for Engineering and Systems Sciences at Johns Hopkins University.
3-Robots and drones: a fundamental role
Many airports that have fluid communication with China have installed devices that allow detecting if the temperature of the travelers is higher than normal. They are cameras that use thermal sensors to capture the heat produced by a person's body to generate a 2D image, similar to a physical map, where each temperature is marked with a different color. Chinese cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen implement this technology in subways, schools and community centers.
