COVID19PRM4WWD2020 Initiative
FrontierTech4Good COVID19 Oriented World Water Day 2020 InitiativeMore than 200,000 cases of COVID-19 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019) have been reported to WHO, and estimated more than 8000 people have lost their lives. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the 2019–20 coronavirus outbreak a pandemic and a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). Evidence of local transmission of the disease has been found in many countries across all six WHO regions.
Common symptoms include fever, cough, shortness of breath. The rate of symptoms varies ranging from fever to diarrhea with complications including pneumonia and kidney failure. The incubation period for COVID -19 has been varyingly reported ranging from 6 to 14 days.
The disease is said to be caused by the virus severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS COV-2) previously referred to as the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCOV).
Lungs are reported the most infected organs and the diseases primarily spreading between people via respiratory droplets from coughs and sneezes.
The virus is said to remain viable for up to three days on plastic and stainless-steel SARS-CoV-2 lasting up to three days, or in aerosols for three hours.
The virus is also believed to be found in feces, but as of March 2020 it is unknown whether transmission through feces is possible, and the risk is expected to be low. Treatment protocols continue to be symptomatic and supportive.
The WHO (https://bit.ly/39Y29Ff) has published several testing protocols for the disease and launched a ‘COVID19 ResponseFund’ with primarily three objectives towards strategic preparedness and response in 1) Coordinate across regions to assess, respond and mitigate the risks, 2) Improve country preparedness and response and 3) Accelerate research and development. The COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund is said to have raised more than US$43 million from more than 173,000 individuals and organizations, a few days since the launch. It is noteworthy to note that India has committed USD 10 million towards global strategic response of the outbreak and declared the outbreak as a ‘Notified Disaster’ (https://bit.ly/2xaI9k2) .
As of 11th March 2020, WHO in its response brief has reported to have bought and shipped close to 1.5 million PPE (Personal Protection Equipment ) items across 57 countries, disseminated 40 public advisory documents, developed 6 multilingual online courses and 1 simulation exercise reaching 176000 responders ( https://openwho.org/channels/covid-19 ) and strengthened the laboratory capacity substantially.
The WHO Director-General’s opening remarks at a recent media briefing on COVID-19 – 18 March 2020 (https://bit.ly/3a3pzcq) suggests ‘distance and cluster based transmission channels’ need close address, ‘lessons drawn from various country responses need to be rigorously collated and contextually adapted ‘ and more ‘Solidarity Trials’ need to be underway to ramp up the global research and development communities efforts in treating such current and potentially future diseases of this scale and genre efficaciously.
This one of its kind tracking initiative from the stable of the ‘Change Planet Partners Climate Innovation Foundation’ draws from the strategic pointers of a recent WHO Director – General’s speech and evidences what can be called an innovative 3 pronged ‘Pandemic Response Mechanism(PRM)’ based on frontier ML(Machine Learning ) /AI (Artificial Intelligence ) / Blockchain technologies.
The first part of the said Mechanism covers 1) Emerging Clinical Responses covering transient and medium to long term immunity.
The second part of the Mechanism covers 2) Emerging Contextual Responses ranging from Risk Assessment /Early Warning Alerts, Incident/Heat Maps applying a variety of modelling approaches; effective distance based, social media led, proprietary algorithms driven on a wide gamut of contagion factors to name a few.
And the third part of the Mechanism covers 3) Emerging Research Responses addressing well defined scientific questions covering key research and development priorities, pandemic research open data sets, response directed data challenges, and search and monitoring platforms targeting a broad spectrum of research and data/insight communities.
We believe such a mapping initiative is a small but critical step in bringing together the growing body of evidence tackling the timely and much needed topic of ‘Strategic Preparedness and Response’ of Pandemic Outbreaks albeit with specific reference to #COVID-19.
But, importantly how does all this tie up to World Water Day 2020, one may ask!
Our answer to that lays in this year’s thematic focus (Water and Climate Change) of World Water Day 2020 with specific emphasis on ‘Water for Health and Wellbeing’ tying SDG6 and SDG3 goals through the route of building up long term immunity in what can be called as ‘Water4Health ‘ by
- well informed sustained healthy lifestyle choices,
- safe WASH practices,
- leverage on immuno-therapeutic and nutritive properties of water
starting with individuals and thereby highlighting the crucial role of ‘Water’s role in such an endeavor #WorldWaterDay.
Stay Safe! Stay Hydrated! Stay Informed! (2 Good reads we suggest: ‘The Spiritual Life of Water: Its Power and Purpose’: Alick Bartholomew, ‘Message from Water’: Dr. Masaru Emoto)
Happy World Water Day 2020!
Emerging Clinical Responses
The Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) program aims to support military readiness and global stability through pursuit of novel methods to dramatically accelerate discovery, integration, pre-clinical testing, and manufacturing of medical countermeasures against infectious diseases. P3 aims specifically to develop a scalable, adaptable, rapid response platform capable of producing relevant numbers of doses against any known or previously unknown infectious threat within 60 days of identification of such a threat in order to keep the outbreak from escalating and decrease disruptions to the military and homeland.
P3 focuses on rapid discovery, characterization, production, testing, and delivery of efficacious DNA- and RNA-encoded medical countermeasures, a foundational technology pioneered by DARPA under the Autonomous Diagnostics to Enable Prevention and Therapeutics (ADEPT) program that provides the body with instructions on how to immediately begin producing protective antibodies against a given threat thereby safely delivering ‘transient immunity’, halting the spread of disease by creating a firewall, and help in buying time for longer-term medical responses to be developed and deployed.
Learn more at: https://bit.ly/2xT3tv1
Close to 30 vaccines/drugs (including a few traditional ones) are in various stages of global research and development and clinical trials to demonstrate their efficacy in treating the infections of the coronavirus. A preliminary list of such vaccines/drugs has been recently published highlighting various novel mechanisms in their discovery, integration and clinical testing.
Predictive Oncology is one example of an AI Platform for the discovery and development of vaccines against coronavirus. Mateon Therapeutics is another example that has launched an antiviral response programme to develop coronavirus treatments using its therapeutic and artificial intelligence (AI) platforms.
While the pandemic has catalyzed the development of novel coronavirus vaccines , some of them led by AI platforms, across the biotech industry, both by pharmaceutical companies and research organizations such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), US, the world is some way away in getting to their critical mass and mainstreaming in combating potential future pandemic outbreaks.
Alternate medicine/complementary therapies based on traditional wisdom, though controversial, do seem to have a place, until the world gets there and despite a backlash on a recent AYUSH communique on the potential for possible application of traditional remedies, evidence (sparse albeit) seems to be emerging on their symptomatic and supportive usage.
Learn more at: https://bit.ly/33xykZz
Emerging Contextual Responses
Outbreak AI combines the power of Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Social Media to track potential pandemic outbreaks using virus spread ratio concept over geographic and time dimensions. With the help of OutbreakAI, a successful disease awareness and prevention campaign can be run as a precautionary measure in advance before, the disease spreads and attacks in neighboring geographical vicinity through visualization dashboards, optionally.
Bluedot, another example, provides a proprietary AI platform combines multiple sources of data (100 datasets) and expertise of a spectrum of domain experts to generate disease surveillance insights/alerts for a spectrum of stakeholders in governments and businesses.
Learn more at:https://bit.ly/3bdHRrD | https://bit.ly/2QuM8ih
Harvard Medical School’s HealthMap, uses AI to sift through news articles and other digital media for signs of new cases. Johns Hopkins University opened up the data behind its case-tracking map, which aggregates data from a range of official Chinese, American, and WHO sources.
Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Risk Assessment based on a computational/mathematical model, outlining the concept of ‘effective distance’, predicts the expected global spread of the novel coronavirus using worldwide air transportation network that connects over 4000 airports with more than 50000 flight routes.
With cheap computational power availability, influx of computer scientists to the public health field and WHO emergency call to open up and out large pandemic outbreak datasets of varied nature, AI is at the forefront to sift through such disparate and large volumes of data as well as support the outbreak predictions in a sense of new found scientific communities transparency.
Learn More at : https://bit.ly/2WvdN6z | https://bit.ly/2WqEnOc | https://bit.ly/3a5y3Q2
Emerging Research Responses
A unique cooperative effort between academic, government and industry researchers has produced a new, structured dataset that the worldwide machine learning community can use to advance COVID-19 research. The COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) is comprises of more than 24,000 scholarly articles (including more than 10,000 full-text articles) about coronavirus family viruses and hosted at SemanticScholar.org.
It’s expected to be an extensive machine-readable coronavirus literature collection available for data and text mining to date. Organized by the White House, the organizations that helped structure the data include the Allen Institute for AI, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Microsoft Research and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
CORD-19 based Open Research Dataset AI Challenge outlines 10 tasks – based on the WHO led scientific consensus on ‘research priorities’ is currently on inviting a cross section of participant teams to come up with novel solutions in combating the pandemics outbreak.
Learn More at: https://bit.ly/33tvapK | https://bit.ly/2x8yJWx
Tackling the emergence of a new global pandemic is a complex task. But collective intelligence is now being used around the world by communities and governments to respond.
At its simplest, collective intelligence is the enhanced capacity created when distributed groups of people work together, often with the help of technology, to mobilize more information, ideas and insights to solve a problem.
Advances in digital technologies combining human intelligence with machine learning are helping to generate new insights from novel sources of data and such combination is believed to be suited to addressing fast-evolving, complex global disease pandemic outbreaks such as COVID-19.
7 such sources are highlighted varying from disparate datasets of contagion vectors to social media among others.
Learn More at: https://bit.ly/33wsuI6
Innoplexus recently announced that it will share an open license for general access to its Ontosight® AI Search platform to help researchers learn more about the novel coronavirus.
While the Company’s smart contract system serves to help search unpublished data and make transactions, real-time valuation of unpublished data through AI agent enables integration of confidential data in a secured way.
With government science advisers in a dozen countries asking to make data on the disease more widely available, Innoplexus is answering that call to make publications available to the research community.
COVID-19 Blockchain Monitor
The Public Health Blockchain Consortium (PHBConsortium.org) released a virus free monitoring blockchain for the systematic, continual, and anonymous verification of communities and workplaces that are free from coronavirus COVID-19, and other high-risk viruses, bacteria and fungi, to assist them in staying free of potentially life-threatening diseases by integrating real-time information from virus surveillance providers with artificial intelligence (AI) geographical information systems (GIS).
The blockchain stores a workplace’s or community’s protection certificate from security organizations or government bodies to assure that all persons who enter a safe zone are continuously monitored.
Learn More at: https://bit.ly/2vEd9J3 | https://bit.ly/3a7WY5z
COVID19PRM4WWD2020 Initiative > Water4Health > Links SDG6 with SDG3