In this work, we study the causal relations among German regions in terms of the spread of Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic, taking into account the restriction policies that were applied by the different federal states. We loose a strictly formulated assumption for a causal feature selection method for time series data, robust to latent confounders, which we subsequently apply on Covid-19 case numbers.

In this work, we study the causal relations among German regions in terms of the spread of Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic, taking into account the restriction policies that were applied by the different federal states. We loose a strictly formulated assumption for a causal feature selection method for time series data, robust to latent confounders, which we subsequently apply on Covid-19 case numbers. Since our results are based on rather limited target time series (only the numbers of reported cases), care should be exercised in interpreting them. However, it is encouraging that already such limited data seems to contain causal signals. This suggests that as more data becomes available, our causal approach may contribute towards meaningful causal analysis of political interventions on the development of Covid-19, and thus also towards the development of rational and data-driven methodologies for choosing interventions.

As vaccine production & procurement processes are ramping up, the distribution of vaccines is a thing of concern. As large amount vaccine units roll out, the first step is strategic & wise distribution among regions, considering conducive & causative factors raising the urgency of requirements. For this, organizations & governments may look upon the predictive suggestions [1] backed by data to chart out further plans. Many countries, particularly those in the developing world, where governments are struggling to procure vaccines to vaccinate their residents. One of the decisions to be taken strategically is the wise & calculated distribution of the vaccine received. Although few countries are actively trying to increase vaccination rates, the overall 56% world population is yet to take their first vaccine dose.

We find that economic activity reduction inferred from NO2 is a driver of case deceleration in most of the territories.

Researchers at Texas A&M University have recently begun using artificial intelligence to forecast the growth of COVID-19 cases in communities across the country. The university is using a deep-learning model, a method of machine-learning that relies on large amounts of data, to process data related to population activities and mobility to help predict the spread of COVID-19 at a county level. Ali Mostafavi, the project's lead researcher, said this work could help lawmakers make informed policy decisions to protect residents and mitigate spread of the virus. "Significant opportunities exist using these big data and AI to contain the existing pandemic and also better prepare and mitigate the future pandemics," said Mostafavi, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. According to an announcement from the university last week, data fed into the model included the movement of people within communities, census data, social-distancing data, past case count growth and social demographics.

We have developed a globally applicable diagnostic Covid-19 model by augmenting the classical SIR epidemiological model with a neural network module. Our model does not rely upon previous epidemics like SARS/MERS and all parameters are optimized via machine learning algorithms employed on publicly available Covid-19 data. The model decomposes the contributions to the infection timeseries to analyze and compare the role of quarantine control policies employed in highly affected regions of Europe, North America, South America and Asia in controlling the spread of the virus. For all continents considered, our results show a generally strong correlation between strengthening of the quarantine controls as learnt by the model and actions taken by the regions' respective governments. Finally, we have hosted our quarantine diagnosis results for the top $70$ affected countries worldwide, on a public platform, which can be used for informed decision making by public health officials and researchers alike.

Debunking misinformation is an important and time-critical task as there could be adverse consequences when misinformation is not quashed promptly. However, the usual supervised approach to debunking via misinformation classification requires human-annotated data and is not suited to the fast time-frame of newly emerging events such as the COVID-19 outbreak. In this paper, we postulate that misinformation itself has higher perplexity compared to truthful statements, and propose to leverage the perplexity to debunk false claims in an unsupervised manner. First, we extract reliable evidence from scientific and news sources according to sentence similarity to the claims. Second, we prime a language model with the extracted evidence and finally evaluate the correctness of given claims based on the perplexity scores at debunking time. We construct two new COVID-19-related test sets, one is scientific, and another is political in content, and empirically verify that our system performs favorably compared to existing systems. We are releasing these datasets publicly to encourage more research in debunking misinformation on COVID-19 and other topics.

With the spiraling pandemic of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), it has becoming inherently important to disseminate accurate and timely information about the disease. Due to the ubiquity of Internet connectivity and smart devices, social sensing is emerging as a dynamic sensing paradigm to collect real-time observations from online users. In this vision paper we propose CovidSens, the concept of social-sensing-based risk alerting systems to notify the general public about the COVID-19 spread. The CovidSens concept is motivated by two recent observations: 1) people have been actively sharing their state of health and experience of the COVID-19 via online social media, and 2) official warning channels and news agencies are relatively slower than people reporting their observations and experiences about COVID-19 on social media. We anticipate an unprecedented opportunity to leverage the posts generated by the social media users to build a real-time analytic system for gathering and circulating vital information of the COVID-19 propagation. Specifically, the vision of CovidSens attempts to answer the questions of: how to track the spread of the COVID-19? How to distill reliable information about the disease with the coexistence of prevailing rumors and misinformation in the social media? How to inform the general public about the latest state of the spread timely and effectively and alert them to remain prepared? In this vision paper, we discuss the roles of CovidSens and identify the potential challenges in implementing reliable social-sensing-based risk alerting systems. We envision that approaches originating from multiple disciplines (e.g. estimation theory, machine learning, constrained optimization) can be effective in addressing the challenges. Finally, we outline a few research directions for future work in CovidSens.