Coronavirus Researchers Are Using High-Tech Methods to Predict Where the Virus Might Go Next

As the deadly 2019-nCov coronavirus spreads, raising fears of a worldwide pandemic, researchers and startups are using artificial intelligence and other technologies to predict where the virus might appear next -- and even potentially sound the alarm before other new, potentially threatening viruses become public health crises. "What we're doing currently with Coronavirus is really trying to get an understanding of what's happening on the ground through as many sources as we can get our hands on," says John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children's Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School. After SARS killed 774 people around the world in the mid-2000s, his team built a tool called Healthmap, which scrapes information about new outbreaks from online news reports, chatrooms and more. Healthmap then organizes that previously disparate data, generating visualizations that show how and where communicable diseases like the coronavirus are spreading. Healthmap's output supplements more traditional data-gathering techniques used by organizations like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO).