Can Artificial Intelligence Prevent Coronavirus from Spreading?

By CIOReview | Wednesday, February 5, 2020

The combination of human expert and artificial intelligence can efficiently eradicate the spread of coronavirus.

FREMONT, CA: The coronaviruses are a massive family of viruses that are popular among several species of animals like cattle, bats, camels, and cats. Animal coronavirus can rarely infect people, but it can spread among the public with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), and recently identified through novel coronavirus (nCOV).

The first human case of the virus was recognized last year in December in the district of Wuhan, China. It is being predicted that the virus was originated from seafood. The symptoms of the infection are cough, fever, shortness of breath, and sore throat. Coronavirus mainly affects older people, children, and the ones with poor health conditions. Moreover, in recent times due to the outbreak of coronavirus, several cases have been recorded in countries like Thailand, Taiwan, the US, South Korea, and Japan. To prevent the virus from spreading, the city of Wuhan has been on lockdown with no transport links.

What Type of Role can Artificial Intelligence Play?

When there is an outbreak of a disease, the first and the most important thing that must be done is to understand the reason that caused the virus to spread. Artificial intelligence can collect the data about everybody’s movement as they travel and transform it into a device that will help to identify the next area where the virus can attack. As soon as the authorities get to know about the place, they can interfere with medicines and precautions so that it does not spread.

Though in medicine and public health, the position of artificial intelligence is at a nascent stage, but it has made already taken several steps with their computer models that can appropriately diagnose a disease like breast cancer from mammograms and Alzheimer’s by scanning the brain.

Big data can be analyzed from many sources like location, climate data, and health, and with the researchers can create an algorithm that will recognize the patterns in data and generate predicting models that can rapidly identify the future of the disease. Therefore the technology will assist the authorities and experts to become proactive while they respond to such outbreaks in the future.

For example, in the year 2018, artificial intelligence has successfully created a platform known as the Dengue Outbreak Prediction Platform. Furthermore, it has also effectively predicted the outbreak of the disease dengue in Brazil and Malaysia three months ahead of time and even showed 80% accuracy. The platform is now focused on generating the latest algorithms for viruses like Chikungunya and Zika.

Artificial Intelligence can Effectively Tackle nCov

The pace at which coronavirus is spreading has become essential to find a solution that will help to prevent it. Developers need to develop and train an algorithm as soon as possible so that it can forecast the next possibility with the virus because time is vital in this situation. Moreover, the case with this virus has become more difficult because it has never been encountered before. However, here are some of the reasons due to which AI can help in eradicating coronavirus.

1. Since the usage of AI in several areas of healthcare, like recognizing brain tumors and enhancing treatments, has been successful. Therefore if the technology is used in the case of coronavirus, also there are chances that it can fight the medical emergencies that have occurred in those areas. The government will have access to a massive amount of data that can be used against those viruses.

2. AI can be used to model and forecast the outbreak of the virus as it will provide a better picture of the procedures that can be applied to treat the infection locally. Furthermore, with the information offered by AI, government officials can precisely forecast the resources that are necessary for those particular locations, recognize the processes in which treatment can be enhanced, and can stop the spread of the virus.

3. With the advancement of technology, it will become easy to find the origin of the virus. Moreover, coordination among human experts, global collaboration, and AI can be the most efficient and fastest method to impede the spreading of coronavirus.

Check out: Top Artificial Intelligence Solution Companies