AI systems aim to sniff out coronavirus outbreaks

Science's COVID-19 coverage is supported by the Pulitzer Center. The international alarm about the COVID-19 pandemic was sounded first not by a human, but by a computer. HealthMap, a website run by Boston Children's Hospital, uses artificial intelligence (AI) to scan social media, news reports, internet search queries, and other data for signs of disease outbreaks. On 30 December 2019, it spotted a news report of a new type of pneumonia in Wuhan, China, and issued a one-line email bulletin that seven people were in critical condition, rating the urgency at three on a scale of five. Colleagues in Taiwan had already alerted Marjorie Pollack, a medical epidemiologist in New York City, to social media chatter in China that reminded her of the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which spread to dozens of countries and killed 774.