Covid-19 Research: Marriage of AI and Medical Prowess
At this point in time, a great percentage of people in the world today are locked in their homes and are stuck on a screen with an internet connection and a lot of time in their hands. It is easy to stir rumors and fear at a time like this; a doomsday prediction from an exponential chart of covid19 cases in one country can sound like a trustworthy prophecy of dystopia. Or is it?
The current situation is a cookbook for both doomsday thinking and valiant efforts to cut through the noise with the right amount of information,
There’s a growing debate of whether the data on coronavirus cases globally should be used to flex some data science muscles. There are groups that treat the data as a purely mathematical problem. They run the numbers of a growing trend that assimilates exponential behavior and leave it. But for epidemiologists and medical experts, these individual statistics are more than just data points: these involve complex systems of human beings across nations that are suffering from a global pandemic and has complexities that a strictly mathematical background cannot capture in its entirety. This is where the presence of domain expertise in the medical and health sciences comes in handy.
We here at Coronatracker ensures that our mix of data scientists who are running the numbers on our studies also involves some vetting from members of the medical community. We have doctors and members of medical research who make sure that what we post on our channels and on our pubished research has both data and medical integrity. It is also the primary reason why we managed to get an acknowledgment from the World Health Organization earlier in the phase of our volunteer platform development through our first research paper. To date, we are the only live coronavirus tracker that has this accreditation.
It is a good time to be discriminating with the information we digest and share with other people in our network. Here are some questions we need to ask these days before sharing anything online: Is it helpful? Is it true? Is it grounded on facts and vetted by experts in the field? Is it well-researched or founded on solid data sources? If the information comes from a government agency, did it really come from them or was their logo just used in that infographic to lend credence to the information? Anything that falls short should be taken with a grain of salt.
Keep yourself updated with data coming from official sources with our tracker at coronatracker.com and follow us on our social media pages including here at Medium. Our initiative is powered by a team of global volunteers who value data and medical integrity at this time of severe global medical challenges. If you also have more time in your hands while you conduct social distancing, considering joining our crew and let’s help make the world a better place one data point at a time.
