As the novel coronavirus pandemic COVID-19 continues to spread across the globe, researchers are racing against time to find possible preventive measures, tests and cures to arrest the spread. While the pandemic enters the stage of community spread in many parts of the world, countries are running short of essential medical kits to test sufficient numbers of people. Testing is the need of the hour, and to catalyse the pace of testing, scientists have now developed an artificial intelligence-based diagnostic tool. The incredible new tool can help predict if an individual is likely to have COVID-19 disease, based on the symptoms they display. The discovery was recently published in the journal Nature Medicine.

Prediction: Health surveillance companies spotted Covid-19 in late December by parsing news reports, social media, and official statements, but predicting how the epidemic will spread is harder. AI companies could do more if they were allowed access to patient records, but that would require working through thorny privacy issues. The U.S. recently finalized new rules for giving patients more control over their health data. What's missing is an option for patients to share their data securely with researchers. Diagnosis: A number of tools analyze scans of patients' lungs to detect coronavirus infections.