What is the solution to the coronavirus pandemic? I will be introducing this post with this question since the WHO declared COVID-19 a Pandemic.
0n February 8th Lee Hsien Loong Singapore prime minister shared via his Facebook account that they had seen the spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19) among Singapore citizens who haven’t been to china before or been associated with china. In his words he said, “We’ve seen some cases which cannot be traced to the source of infection. These worried us because it showed that the virus is probably already circulating in our own population.”
Like Singapore, global experts have issued warnings that there is a risk that more countries may already or be likely to have an incidence of Coronavirus (COVID-19) among citizens which now brings me to the question I asked at the beginning of this post. The situation is no longer a China problem but now a world problem as the virus might be knocking the doors of any country in the world now since the population of China is high and Chinese seem to have a relationship with the rest of the world.
The WHO confirmed that as at February 14th, 505 cases of coronavirus have been found in 24 countries outside China and the possibility that this cases will continue to increase is certain if a solution isn’t found.
An Overview of Coronavirus
If you haven’t heard about coronavirus, let me give you a brief. Coronavirus (COVID-19) is from a family of virus associated with common cold and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). It is believed to be a zoonotic disease meaning it originates from animals such as Bats, snakes, Camels (In cases of Middle East respiratory Syndrome coronavirus) which then spreads to humans. The WHO has indicated that common signs of coronavirus includes breathing problem, high fever, excessive coughing and gasping for breath.
Can Artificial Intelligence help in finding a Solution to coronavirus?
Let us do a little rewind. It is not news that Bluedot, a Canadian Artificial intelligence, had been sounding a warning of the coronavirus disease before the World health organization (WHO) alerted the world about it in January 9th 2020. Bluedot Company sent a warning to its customers warning them not to go to Wuhan district or avoid the region completely due to a flu-like disease outbreak.
Bluedot has proven that AI can sift through data in regions to determine the occurrence of a disease among people, which is a great addition to the use of artificial intelligence. Identifying a new virus is the first step before mobilizing response and then finding a solution of which AI has been able to identify the spread of the virus. The use of natural language and machine learning by artificial by AI has helped the machine understand several languages and at such chop through several news reports, flight records as well others data to identify diseases. In the same way, companies like Metabiota is using AI to track the spread of the virus in real time.
Using the Metabiota AI, I just realized there is a case of coronavirus in Africa (Egypt).
screenshot from metabiota
Artificial intelligence has been helpful in producing drugs in the past, a very good example is the drug molecule known as DSP-1181 which is used to treat patients with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). With improvement on Artificial intelligence to produce drugs and vaccines, it will not be surprising if artificial intelligence finds a vaccine for coronavirus.