In the last few months of last year, social media comments were on fire. They were announcing that something was going on in Wuhan. Residents of this Chinese city of 11 million people said they felt bad, coughed and had a fever.

What was going on, though? They didn’t know it yet, but a program created by a Canadian start-up called Blue Dot’s found the answer. Surely, these “I feel bad,” “something is wrong with me,” or “I’m sick” were some of those hundreds of data sets that were analyzed by startup algorithms and concluded that an infectious disease was emerging in the provincial capital of Hubei. The startup revealed everything before the Chinese authorities and the World Health Organization (WHO) warned the world about the Covid-19 coronavirus, which has now become a global pandemic.

In this regard, it is worth remembering that Blue Dot´s also announced the departure of Zika in Florida (Miami), six months before that happened. This company, like many others, is facing artificial intelligence and big data against coronavirus.

Nuria Oliver is a data scientist. He recalls how in 2009 he analyzed the added and anonymous data on mobile telephony to measure the clash of tough measures taken by the Mexican government (similar to those taken today by Spain and Italy) to stop the flu pandemic. Many years have passed and since then the use of smar-tphone has become widespread until it has now become an attachment to our body. Thus, they have become a pit of data for its users. They know everything about us.

China vs. United States

In China, where there is hardly a moment of ordinary life that is dependent on digital care, these have used mobile phones to control all citizens. That’s why Oliver advocates for added use (collecting data from thousands of people) and anonymity (removing any personal information). In this way, the pandemic can be tackled, "to cause the country's hotspots, to detect the flow of citizens between different geographical areas and to draw their mobility".

This is the purpose of the announcement made recently in Brussels: Telefónica and seven other telecommunications operators will provide location data of their mobile phone users to the European Commission to facilitate the monitoring of the spread of conoravirus.
Analysis of all this data, according to Oliver, “allows us to predict how quickly the virus can spread and, when necessary, take part to reduce mobility,” as is the case in Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom or the United States.

In China, some controversial uses of technology and artificial intelligence are made, including a face recognition system and temperature detection software to identify people with a fever; In South Korea, meanwhile, the Corona app alerts you if someone is infected within 100 yards; and in the United States, meanwhile, an application similar to that of Asians is emerging, but one that guarantees individual rights and privacy. Oliver says this app is called Safepaths and its development is in the hands of MIT, Harvard University and Facebook.