COVID-19 has shaken businesses and work. Overnight, work-from-home became the new normal. The best laid out business models, revenue streams, projections, have all gone for a toss. Lockdowns, social distancing, travel bans, and other protocols cause big-time disruption.

Society is fighting back to regain normalcy. In this fight, IT pros pitch in with new portals, products, tools, and other resources.

Coronavirus Trackers

One of the obvious uses of technology in COVID19 response is in tracking the spread of the virus, and the associated effects. Various tracking portals offer live information on cases, death rate, and recoveries. These portals integrate data from various sources, and present information in innovative ways.

Google’s COVID-19 public datasets program focus on making data accessible to researchers. This dataset powers the US National Response Portal, an open data platform that delivers a ground-level view of COVID-19. 

Tableau’s COVID-19 data hub allows users to create custom visualizations. The platform pulls in data from several high-quality sources such as US CDC, Johns Hopkins University, and WHO. The tracker is downloadable from the Salesforce AppExchange, for use by Salesforce customers.

Domo’s COVID-19 tracker pulls in disparate data from several sources and gives a broad, live context to the pandemic. The platform offers projections and other relevant information to users, to assess the impact of the pandemic.

Instagram founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger launched Rt.live. The tool pulls in data from the COVID Tracking Project to determine the pace of spread. The COVID tracking project, a volunteer-driven effort, pulls in information from authentic sources, including unstructured sources such as news conferences.

Database vendor Neo4j’s Graphs4Good project tracks the spread of COVID19 through graph databases. Graph data technology connects large datasets from many sources and removes the blind spot of thinking data in rows and columns only.

Monitoring Technologies

Tracing, tracking, and monitoring infected people is critical to contain the spread of COVID19. Various tech projects offer innovative ways to track infected and high-risk people.

Tech giants Alibaba and Tencent developed smartphone apps to track people in China. The app assigns colour code to users depending on their location, movements and contact with infected people. Public places such as metro stations and even offices could grant entry to only those with a green colour code. Alibaba’s cloud-based Coronavirus diagnosis tool uses AI to detect traces of the virus with 95% accuracy.

Several other developers create apps all over the world. Such trace and track apps raise privacy concerns though. PACT, a project by researchers from MIT enable track and trace while preserving privacy. PACT relies on short-range Bluetooth signals or chirps emitted by smartphones. A database collects the chirps from the smartphones of persons testing positive. Other smartphones scan the database to see if it has picked up any chirps present in the database. A match indicates exposure to the virus.

Jvion, a healthcare analytics company, adopts a different approach to trace and track. The tool applies AI to over 5000 variables to identify high-risk people and communities. The variables relate to factors such as medical history, lifestyle, housing and transportation,

App-Based Resources

The biggest tech innovations related to COVID-19 come through resources enabling new ways of doing things.

Dr Siaw Tung Yeng, a Singapore based physician, has developed MaNaDr, a telehealth app to facilitate virtual doctor visits.

Paginemediche, a digital health startup, has developed a chatbot for seamless patient-doctor interaction. Several comparable projects are ongoing worldwide.

BBDO Guerrero of Philippines has launched a collaborative project to develop a chatbot that sniffs out fake news.

Alipay’s blockchain platform enables government agencies and NGOs to collaborate. Developers use them to track the allocation of relief supplies and trace medical supplies, among other use-cases.

Overwhelmed hospitals and staff shortages are a big concern during the pandemic. Apollo, a health tech startup, matches healthcare professionals with healthcare organizations and facilities. An AI-based algorithm matches institutions needing immediate employees.

Another big fallout of the pandemic response, especially lockdowns, is food shortages. Software engineers Greg Sadetsky and Colin Wren developed a project to address food security. A crowd-sourced open-source interactive map, updated daily, lists free meal sites in the U.S.

Postman, a San Francisco-based platform crowdsources information on coronavirus testing sites.

The U.S. Digital Response, a coalition of volunteer technologists, is orchestrating 150+ projects. Most of these projects build new apps to address specific needs, address data challenges and automate processes.

Salesforce’s Work.com guide businesses to re-open post-COVID-19 lockdowns. The platform collates information from health experts and business leaders, with Salesforce resources. It offers recommendations, shifts scheduling capabilities, tracking system, and other tools.

Devices

Various tech start-ups develop a slew of devices, from temperature scanners to masks, and from robots to drones to fight COVID-19.

Cocoslabs Innovative Solutions, India based start-up, has developed a device integrating AI-based software, thermal cameras and GPU servers. The device detects body temperature and predicts the age, gender, and race of people in crowded public places.

Baidu’s AI-powered infrared system detects changes in a person’s body temperature, at public places such as railway stations. The system can examine up to 200 people in one minute without disrupting passenger flow.

Hundreds of 3D printing design engineers collaborate to produce of respirators, valves, and masks. A hospital in Italy used such resources to 3D-print valves on reanimation devices, and save hundreds of lives.

Thincr Technologies, another India-based start-up has developed face masks with a 3D printed coating of antiviral agent Sodium Olefin Sulfonate.

Popular applications of robots include running errands at field hospitals and spraying disinfectants. Cloud Minds, in collaboration with Wuchang Hospital and China Mobile, has developed IoT powered robots that use 5G enabled thermometers to screen patients. Little Peanut, a robot, delivered food to passengers on a flight from Singapore to Hangzhou.

Computing Support

Several tech players offer a wealth of resources to support those in the frontlines, battling the pandemic.

IBM’s COVID-19 High-Performance Computing Consortium dedicates computing resources extending to 330 petaflops, 775,000 CPU cores, 34,000 GPUs, and more, to researchers trying to understand COVID19. During the SARS outbreak in 2002, decoding the genome of the virus took more than a year. These huge resources reduced the time-period to identify the Coronavirus genome to a month.

The “CTI League,” A network of cybersecurity professionals, help hospitals fend off hackers. The team seeks vulnerabilities and pre-empts hackers from hospitals and other medical facilities.

COVID-19 has exposed human fragility, but technology offers hope for humankind. Success depends on mustering available resources and deploying the latest technology.