How Governments Have Used AI to Fight COVID-19

Governments all around the globe are using artificial intelligence (AI) to help fight against the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The technology is being used for various different things, including speeding up the development of testing kits and treatments, giving citizens access to real-time data, and tracking the spread of the virus. 

Here are some of the different countries. 

South Korea

South Korea’s government, one that is being touted as an example for how to combat the virus, pushed their private sector to start developing testing kits right away, immediately after the reports began to arrive out of China. 

One of those companies was Seoul-based molecular biotech company Seegene, which used AI to help quicken the process of developing testing kits. The company was able to submit its solution to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) just three weeks after the scientists began their work. According to Chun Jong-Yoon, founder and chief executive of the company, the process would have taken at least two to three months without the use of AI. 

Since the testing kits are such a crucial part of getting the virus under control, this proves that AI technology can play a huge role in the fight.

Traditionally, the approval process for new medical equipment, including testing kits, takes around 18 months. The KCDC decided to move the process ahead and approved the tests in one week. The government's own patient samples were able to be used for evaluation. 

Telecoms firm KT has also partnered with South Korea government ministries in order to use AI-based healthcare services to track the spread of the virus. 

The research project was led by the ICT Ministry and Ministry of Interior and Safety, along with universities and research institutes. KT will be responsible for providing mobile data, who can help create maps. These maps can then provide insight into how the populations are moving and the virus spreading.

China

Scientists in China used AI in order to speed up scientific processes. Through the use of the technology, they were able to recreate the genome sequence of the virus in a month. Comparing that to the months it took scientists to create the sequence of the SARS virus in 2003, it is a big step up. 

Taiwan

In Taiwan, the technology has been used as well. Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s digital minister, relied on AI to develop real-time digital updates. These updates could alert citizens of certain hazardous locations, where infections had been previously detected. They were also able to use it to create a live map of local face mask supplies. 

United States

In the United States, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy called for the development of the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19). This dataset is a collection of thousands of different machine-readable COVID-19 literature. There are over 44,000 scholarly articles that can be used by the research community. 

“It’s all-hands on deck as we face the COVID-19 pandemic,” Microsoft’s chief scientific officer, Dr. Eric Horvitz said. “We need to come together as companies, governments, and scientists and work to bring our best technologies to bear across biomedicine, epidemiology, AI, and other sciences. The COVID-19 literature resource and challenge will stimulate efforts that can accelerate the path to solutions on COVID-19.”

While there is still a lot more that can be accomplished with artificial intelligence (AI), these are some of the current examples from around the globe. If governments are convinced by the results, the use of AI during a pandemic could become one the first defense options in the future.