ILLUSTRATION BY
DOUG CHAYKAFORTUNE APRIL 2020 23DIGITAL HEALTHBringing A.I. to theCoronavirus Fight
Artificial intelligence is helping predict the
spread of infectious diseases, giving health
officials a new tool to reduce the threat.
BY AARON PRESSMANON THE LAST DAY of 2019, an artifi-
cial intelligence warning system
run by Toronto startup BlueDot
flagged a news report from China
about a mysterious pneumonia strain
in the city of Wuhan. The system,
which sifts through 100,000 articles
and online posts daily in 65 languages,
alerted BlueDot’s human employees,
who immediately saw parallels to the
deadly SARS outbreak in 2003.
After switching to a system basedIt’s a far cry from when
Khan started BlueDot
about seven years ago.
Back then, mapping the
potential spread of a virus
and alerting authorities
could take several weeks.
And reluctant governments
would sometimes sit on the
data for weeks or months
after that.
But the era of A.I. and
big data has revolutionized
tracking and forecast-
ing the path of infectious
disease outbreaks like that
of the coronavirus. Fueled
by algorithms that can
translate languages and
distinguish between differ-
ent meanings—Anthrax,
the heavy metal band,
versus anthrax, the infec-
tious disease—BlueDot and
its rivals suck up all the
data they can to uncover
potential epidemics.
The earlier and more
detailed their warnings
are, the better health au-
thorities can tell where to
screen for infected people
and allocate resources. A
brief head start can save
thousands of lives.
With the coronavirus,
A.I.-based alerts helped the
World Health Organization
and China’s officials react
more quickly than they did
during previous outbreaks
like that of SARS. Still,
early warnings can do only
so much: China’s govern-
ment has been criticized
for moving too slowly,
while the U.S. stumbled
over a lack of test kits.
The systems created
by the startups feed off
information generated by
an ever more intercon-
nected and mobile world,
using everything fromon data from billions of
airline passenger itinerar-
ies, BlueDot was able to
determine almost instan-
taneously which cities
worldwide were most at
risk if the mystery illness
spread. The company
quickly sent out warnings
to health authorities and
other clients about what
would come to be called
the coronavirus outbreak,
which has so far infected
almost 100,000 people and
killed more than 3,000 as
of early March.
“Outbreaks don’t care
whether it’s New Year’s Eve
or not,” says Dr. Kamran
Khan, CEO at BlueDot
and a medical professor at
the University of Toronto.
“In order to get in front of
these diseases and threats,
we have to move even
faster than they do.”THE BRIEFDIG.W.0420.XMIT.indd 23 FINAL 3/9/2020 2:54:24 PM