How can artificial intelligence be used in the future to manage pandemics?
Answers
The past two decades were marked with the outbreaks of many viral diseases such as Chikungunya, Ebola, Zika, Nipah, H7N9 Bird flu, H1N1, SARS and MERS. The world woke up to this decade with a new disease outbreak. An outbreak of a novel Coronavirus emerged in Wuhan city in the Hubei province of China in December 2019. Most of the initially identified patients were traced back to the ‘wet market’ where live animals are slaughtered and sold. The market might have played a role as an amplification hotspot from where the virus spread to other parts of China and subsequently to 213 countries and territories in a very short time. The WHO named this disease ‘COVID-19’, which is an acronym of Coronavirus Disease 2019 on 11 February 2020. As of 17 August 2020, a total of 21.2 million confirmed cases and 761,000 deaths have been reported globally [1]