In 2003, the SARS outbreak took the world by surprise. "For me, the SARS outbreak was an eye-opening event," says Dr. Kamran Khan, infectious disease physician, professor of medicine and public health at the University of Toronto, and founder and CEO of BlueDot. "I recognized that we'd never seen anything like it before, but there would be more outbreaks like this again in the future." Khan spent the next 10 years studying infectious disease spread, looking for a way to better detect and respond to threats like SARS and the ones that followed. By 2013, machine learning technology had advanced to the point where he was able to put his vision of a digital global warning system into action -- and BlueDot was born.

One of the advantages we have today in the fight against coronavirus that wasn't as sophisticated in the SARS outbreak of 2003 is big data and the high level of technology available. China tapped into big data, machine learning, and other digital tools as the virus spread through the nation in order to track and contain the outbreak. The lessons learned there have continued to spread across the world as other countries fight the spread of the virus and use digital technology to develop real-time forecasts and arm healthcare professionals and government decision-makers with intel they can use to predict the impact of the coronavirus. China's Surveillance Infrastructure Used to Track Exposed People China's surveillance culture became useful in the country's response to COVID-19. Thermal scanners were installed in train stations to detect elevated body temperatures--a potential sign of infection.

The coronavirus illness (nCoV) is now an international public health emergency, bigger than the SARS outbreak of 2003. Unlike SARS, this time around scientists have better genome sequencing, machine learning, and predictive analysis tools to understand and monitor the outbreak. During the SARS outbreak, it took five months for scientists to sequence the virus's genome. However, the first 2019-nCoV case was reported in December, and scientists had the genome sequenced by January 10, only a month later. Researchers have been using mapping tools to track the spread of disease for several years.

No sooner had a new year begun in 2003 than citizens were seized with panic in Guangdong in south China. Hundreds were suffered from a pneumonia-like strange disease, some of which had been dead. Both Chinese government and Chinese media remained silent all the time as to the risk of a possible epidemic. No one in the rest of the world knew there was any real cause for alarm. But in March, local outbreaks of a mysterious disease were reported in Hong Kong and Southeast Asian countries. The World Health Organization(WHO) issued a global alert. Even then, health authorities could not reveal where the disease had come from. This story at the onset of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak poses an interesting question. Is it possible to discover the presence of a missing disease spreader from the surveillance records on the cases in other regions?