How Artificial Intelligence Can Help Fight COVID-19

Since the beginning of the outbreak of coronavirus, shortly known as COVID-19, many lost their lives which left everyone in an uncertain situation. As coronavirus is an airborne virus, it carries the maximum possibility to spread easily among human beings.

Looking at the data provided by Worldometers, the novel coronavirus has infected a total of 23,388,681 (till filling the report). However, it didn’t stop by affecting people and taking precious lives, it has also put the developed and underdeveloped countries in a strenuous positing, creating an economic crisis to a great extent. Consequently, the whole world has stumbled upon the impact of the coronavirus.

While humans are striving to fight against this deadly virus, it is becoming more challenging to handle due to the constant and easy transmission among the people. In addition, the scope of treating this virus closely is troublesome as the risk of spreading further is there.

Under such circumstances, people are leading toward the existing inventions in order to exploit those and take control of this infectious disease. Among all the technological inventions, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is undoubtedly one of the latest and most significant inventions of all time.

How can this AI actually help to curb and treat COVID-19?

Pondering the possibility and advantages of AI, this technology can easily play the most effective role in treating the infected patients and detecting earlier so that it becomes easier to save lives.

Let’s review the main areas where AI can help fight COVID-19 outbrake.

1. Disease Surveillance
   Gone are those days when nurses had to note down all the details of the patients manually in order to learn more about his/her lifestyle, habits, and other relevant aspects to engage in further treatment. Hence, it was very time-consuming and didn’t seem convenient enough to help the doctors. In the near and distant future, AI can easily detect and analyze all the data associated with patient information even including personal habits that can be available on the internet.
   Subsequently, it can predict the probable treatments and, in most cases, the right treatment for that particular disease. It is a matter of fact that people infected by COVID-19, get admitted to the hospital in a critical moment, and to save time and trouble, doctors can find out all the details within a fraction of seconds with the help of AI.
2. Virtual Healthcare Assistance
   Every day the number of COVID-19 patients is increasing, as a result, it is becoming challenging to provide healthcare assistance physically or agent’s service.
   Here, AI, transformed as Chatbots, can take the full responsibility of providing information about COVID-19 and other diseases, answering questions and requests that do not require medical knowledge, recommending protection measures, checking and monitoring symptoms, etc. AI can also advise similar to healthcare assistance around the clock to help individuals whenever they need it.
3. Quick Diagnosis
   It is necessary to run a quick diagnosis of high-risk infected patients to detect the disease at an early stage and take steps required to curb the possibility of spreading further in real-time.
   The present scenario highlights the fact that the number of patients is increasing which is creating a problematic situation to run a diagnosis on the individuals manually. In contrast, AI takes only a few minutes to detect the issue precisely.
4. Fever Detection
   Fever is one of the primary symptoms of coronavirus. In order to curb the spread, thermal scanners were installed in airports, public spaces, and other places to easily detect body temperature. However, thermal scanners require extra eyes and assistance to detect people with higher body temperature; this is considered one of the inevitable drawbacks of the thermal scanner.
   Replacing the thermal scanner with camera processing AI technology can detect people with fever, track their movement, and immediately put an alarm if any person with higher temperature is detected.
5. Development of new drugs
   There is a significant need for quick advanced drug development. It usually takes up to a few years to research, develop, and create a new medication. Intelligent computing systems can exploit artificial intelligence for drug discovery and improve the overall process to make it quicker and more predictable.
   Artificial Intelligence can compute an unlimited combination of ingredients and make a prediction of how these combinations are going to function, analyze their positive and negative effects, and overall safety, finally providing the best options for healthcare experts to review.
   From the company’s perspective, the result is that they can improve their products or create new medications without having to test numerous possibilities in clinical trials. After developing drugs with AI, it may take only a few months to test them in studies, launch a new product, and save human lives.
6. Control Lockdown rules
   Another important measure to prevent a spread of COVID-19 and other similar diseases is limiting social contact between different people. This can be achieved by controlling social distancing between people. The recommended distance between people on the street is usually at least 5 feet (1.5 meters). Another important aspect is wearing facemasks in public areas. Unfortunately, many individuals decide to ignore these recommendations and increase the spread of coronavirus through public contacts.
   AI can be used here to control drones or other similar automated robots. These machines can be used in public areas to track usage of facemasks, control distance between people, and broadcast health recommendations to a wide audience.

Summary

There can be numerous examples of other sectors where AI can help the government, healthcare experts, medical scientists fight COVID-19 and other possible viruses. This technology, if used for good, is capable of preventing future pandemics and saving millions of lives.

To summarize the whole discussion, it is evident that AI is one of the substantial creations of mankind, facilitating everyone to fight against the infection COVID-19 virus effectively. In simple words, AI has turned into a ‘blessing’ for human beings as it is maneuvering to save lives effectively.