AI is among our most effective tools in the fight against coronavirus

If not the most deadly, the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is one of the most contagious diseases to have hit our green planet in the past decades. In little over three months since the virus was first spotted in mainland China, it has spread to more than 90 countries, infected more than 185,000 people, and taken more than 3,500 lives. As governments and health organizations scramble to contain the spread of coronavirus, they need all the help they can get, including from artificial intelligence. Though current AI technologies are far from replicating human intelligence, they are proving to be very helpful in tracking the outbreak, diagnosing patients, disinfecting areas, and speeding up the process of finding a cure for COVID-19. Data science and machine learning might be two of the most effective weapons we have in the fight against the coronavirus outbreak. Just before the turn of the year, BlueDot, an artificial intelligence platform that tracks infectious diseases around the world, flagged a cluster of "unusual pneumonia" cases happening around a market in Wuhan, China.