Ride the Lightning

Artificial Intelligence Tracks COVID-19

April 28, 2020

Artificial intelligence is truly at the forefront of informing us what the heck is going on with COVID-19. 60 Minutes carried a great segment on April 26^th. You can read about it in this article, which features BlueDot, a small Canadian company with an algorithm that scours the world for outbreaks of infectious disease. It's a digital early warning system, and it was among the first to raise alarms about COVID-19.

It was New Year's Eve when BlueDot's computer issued an alert: a Chinese business paper had just reported 27 cases of a mysterious flu-like disease in Wuhan, a city of 11 million. The signs were ominous. Seven people were already in hospitals.

China didn't say a lot at first, preferring secrecy. BlueDot's computer doesn't rely on official statements. Their algorithm was already churning through data, including medical bulletins, even livestock reports, to predict where the virus would go next.

It was also scanning the ticket data from 4,000 airports. BlueDot wasn't just tracking flights but calculating the cities at greatest risk. On December 31, there were more than 800,000 travelers leaving Wuhan, some likely carrying the disease. Most of the travel came into San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City. The company analyzed that on December 31.

BlueDot has licensed access to the anonymized location data from millions of cellphones. And with that data it identified 12 of the 20 cities that would suffer first.

Their system is reading data currently in 65 languages, and processing this information every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day.

Within two hours of detecting the outbreak on December 31, BlueDot sent a warning of the potential threat to its clients, public health officials in 12 countries, airlines and frontline hospitals, like Humber River in Toronto. This allowed for some early planning, especially to buy PPE.

BlueDot had no clients in the U.S., so the early warning went to other (lucky) places.

California cautiously became the first state in the country to lock down its cities. The lock-down bought time. Despite having its first case of COVID-19 five weeks before New York, California dodged the hurricane of infection that slammed New York City. At his daily teleconference in Sacramento, Governor Gavin Newsom was clear about where he had gotten his edge – outbreak science.

With the virus spreading around the world, California enlisted the help of BlueDot, Esri, Facebook and others, using mapping technologies and cell phone data to predict which hospitals would be hit hardest, and see if Californians were really staying at home.

Outbreak science and AI are obvious partners these days. Let's hope we learn that much from this pandemic.

Sharon D. Nelson, Esq., President, Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
3975 University Drive, Suite 225|Fairfax, VA 22030
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Digital Forensics/Cybersecurity/Information Technology
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