AI Discovered The Coronavirus Breakout In China Way Before Official News From WHO

Way before the news about coronavirus was made official by the US Center For Disease Control (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO), an AI startup in Canada had already known that the cases infected with this virus were multiplying in China.

The startup in question is Bluedot, which knew about the breakout by analyzing language data points that flooded in 2019. This is quite shocking considering that the news about coronavirus in Wuhan only become public more than a week ago by global and Chinese health agencies.

Bluedot has an AI health monitoring platform that analyzes billions of data points on the internet, crunching them to assess public health threats. The AI startup, which has been in operation for five years, knew that something was wrong in China, it sent an alert to all of its clients on December 31 warning about the Wuhan coronavirus. This was long before CDC and WHO or China’s health agencies released the official news.

Before the Wuhan coronavirus, China was not forthcoming in giving alerts to the world about SARS due to what the country was dealing with internally.

As stated in a press release, the startup relies on big data analytics for tracking and anticipating the spread of the most infectious diseases in the world. It uses natural-language processing along with machine-learning techniques, filtering through news reports around the world, data from airlines, as well as reports of animal disease outbreaks.

Then, the team of epidemiologists at Bluedot look at the data and insights generated automatically to see if there’s a pattern of a disease outbreak. If the company is confident about it, it will alert its clients around the world about the potential risk as well as provide safety measures.

Wuhan is currently on lockdown, banning most vehicles from the downtown area to further limit the spread of coronavirus, which has infected over 1,000 people and caused 41 deaths.

Such situations are the best example of the benefits of services like Bluedot. Reports say that the virus has spread to other countries including Thailand, Japan, the US, Australia, etc. If AI can really predict such epidemics, it’s high time we used them more.

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