The month of April has come and as the days are passing the number of cases of COVID-19 patients is increasing day by day. With the number of cases crossing 32 lakhs worldwide and the count of deaths crossing 2 lakhs this virus has become a worldwide threat for each and every individual living in this world.

To tackle this disease each and every working sector we can imagine is trying and doing their best to bring this corona pandemic in control and reduce the number of cases going up each day. In this fight against corona, a growing number of tech organizations and IT professionals are working in a variety of approaches to help battle the continuous coronavirus pandemic. Here’s an overview of what some of them are doing to help battle COVID-19 :

Artificial Intelligence :

AI is being used widely around the world for various purposes. So, this technology has also been started to use to fight against COVID-19. And, AI is proving to be a vital part of the fight against corona. Many tech giants have released some very useful products to tackle this pandemic. Following is some examples of such technologies :

  • Chinese technology giant, Alibaba claimed that is can detect coronavirus traces in the CT scan of the patients’ chest with an accuracy of 96% against pneumonia cases. And this technology takes only 20 seconds to generate the report of the patient.
  • Baidu has made its Linearfold algorithm accessible to logical and medical groups battling the outbreak. This algorithm has reduced the 2019-nCoV prediction time from 55 minutes to 27 seconds.
  • Companies like Insilico Medicine and BenevolentAI are focusing on thousands of molecular structures and their design for a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms of disease and to develop new treatments.
  • Facial Recognition is considered safer than fingerprinting as it reduces the chance of spread of disease through human-surface interaction. Keeping this in mind, SenseTime is applying AI to scan the faces of the people with masks. They are advancing contactless identification of the contaminated with their temperature detection software that has been conveyed at community places in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen.

In many hospitals around the world, robots have been deployed to deliver essential supplies to the patients, check patients’ temperature, and disinfect places. This initiative has reduced the patient-doctor direct interaction, reducing the risk of doctors getting the disease.

Drones :

As we know that Covid-19 symptoms can’t be seen via naked eyes, so it is very important to avoid physical contact with anyone or anything as much as possible. And to tackle this invisible enemy drones are playing a vital role. It helps the authorities and people in the following ways :

  • Surveillance: The authorities need to keep a check on people to ensure they avoid any physical contact or they don’t gather or crowd up in a place. And to do so, they also need to ensure their safety and the personals deployed to do so. Drones are coming handy in such situations and, governments of many countries are deploying drones to keep a check on the people.
  • Broadcast: Drones equipped with loudspeakers are being used in many places to broadcast messages about lockdown measures. Announcements regarding necessary precautions to be taken and warning people to stay indoors are using this.
  • Disinfectant Spraying: Agriculture spray drones are being deployed to sanitize public places and potential COVID-19 affected areas. According to DJI, the world’s largest drone maker company, a spraying UAV can carry around 16 Litre of disinfectant and cover 100,000 sq meter area in an hour.
  • Delivering Items: In this pandemic delivering items, especially medical and grocery items was proving to be another challenge. But some highly developed countries came over this and showed the world way by implementing drones to deliver these items to their respective and proper places. This technique is proving to be useful in red zones where outside physical contact should be minimum.

Mobile Phones & Apps:

That small portable gadget that you’re carrying almost everywhere with you has also taken a vital role to help us fight COVID-19. The DreamLab app, a joint effort between Imperial College and Vodafone, utilizes a phone’s processing power while it charges to quicken research into drugs for Covid-19. Users need to turn on the app and put their phones on charging while they sleep. The app at that point harnesses processing power from the mobile phones to make a virtual supercomputer, equipped for preparing a huge number of calculations without collecting or disclosing users’ location data.

No personal data is downloaded to or processed from the user’s device. Data produced from the figurings will enable Imperial researchers to distinguish existing medications and nourishment based particles with antiviral properties. The app has already helped find potential new cancer drugs and is now aiming to help in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.

A team of around 130 European researchers has created a new phone tracing technology that could tell if you’ve been exposed to the coronavirus – without sacrificing privacy. A person who tested positive for COVID-19 will be given a code that he/she needs to enter in the app. Now if this infected person comes near a healthy person a free app in his/her phone will keep alerting the user that he/she has likely exposed to someone with COVID-19. This technique uses the Bluetooth of the user and is called “contact-tracing”. The task researchers accept their initiative can get individuals back to work with limited hazards by utilizing cell phone to-cell phone wireless signals to detect who has been exposed to somebody with COVID-19 and caution them.

Geographic Information System (GIS) :

GIS is like a framework for gathering managing and analyzing data, which is geo-referenced and which has a latitude and longitude attached to it. This computer-based tool combines multiple layers of location and analytical data from different sources to help understand patterns and trends. It creates a virtual dashboard that shows you all the information. GIS can also be run on mobile networks and can easily be set up in 1-2 days.

Using this the government of different countries can know the potential risks and new cases and plan accordingly and efficiently how to tackle these threats. In some countries like India, this technology is provided to the government for free till August 2020 which is helping these countries to trace the potential hotspot of the spread of the disease and take required steps.

The technologies mentioned above are taking the front stand in our battle against the corona pandemic. With the help of these technologies authorities responsible are finding and implementing various new measures to keep us and themselves safe from the clutch of this invisible enemy. I hope with help technology we are soon able to find a cure or vaccine for this disease and the world is able to go back to the normal pace and this time making things work more efficiently. Till then all we need to do to help the authorities is strictly follow the rules laid down by our government and, stay home and stay safe.