The world’s rapid response to coronavirus threat shows technology’s increasing role in preventing infectious disease outbreaks

Just two weeks after China alerted the world to a mystery new virus, it had been sequenced and identified, with potential vaccines being developed worldwide
As technology advances, expect viral outbreaks to be dealt with even more efficiently, with biosensors, telemedicine consultations and more

Jason Arora

Published: 3:00am, 7 Feb 2020

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“We’re going to the Lunar New Year celebration in town. You guys want to join us?” asked an old friend last month. My response was instantaneous: “Coronavirus. Potential incoming travellers from China … let’s meet up somewhere else.”

The novel coronavirus – 2019-nCoV – is a new strain from animals that is highly transmissible, with as yet no clear cure or safe vaccine. The first cases were reported to the World Health Organisation on New Year’s Eve – a time of mass gathering – and spread in the run up to the Lunar New Year, when around half a billion people across China were on the move, so we have seen a perfect storm of transmissibility.

For some, the provision of trustworthy information and actionable instruction has been slow, inconsistent and confusing. Yet, in reality, the speed and scale of the international response has been one of the fastest in history.

Technology is critical for the spread of information and for the mobilisation of resources. On December 31, China alerted the WHO to an unidentified virus leading to pneumonia and that the likely source was a live meat and seafood market in the large industrial hub of Wuhan.

On January 1, the market was closed. On January 9, the WHO made a global announcement. On January 10, China shared the DNA sequence of the virus to the global public health community. On January 11, the international development of diagnostic tests and a safe vaccine began. All this happened in less than two weeks.

In the background, public health researchers have been forecasting the spread of the disease using cutting-edge data science and analytics to help guide the response from the international health community. Availability of the DNA sequence has meant that global health systems have been able to start developing their own diagnostic tests for the virus immediately.

Then there is the vaccine. In less than four weeks since the announcement, a group in the United States has designed a potential vaccine.

The Inovio lab in San Diego used a relatively new form of DNA sequencing technology to design the potential vaccine in only three hours. Reports suggest that human trials will begin by the summer and that a safe vaccine could be available before the end of the year.

According to the lab, a major driver behind this speedy response is the international Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations set up via the World Economic Forum three years ago. Again, fluid communication across a global community has helped us harness technology on one side of the world to solve a problem that began on the other.

Twenty years ago, the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) spread to over two dozen countries across four continents, killing 813 people over eight months before the WHO declared it contained in July 2003.

The scandal here was that local authorities did not communicate to the international community that they had identified a new and dangerous virus some months previously, by which time it had spread globally.

Let’s go back a bit further, over 100 years, to the 1918 H1N1 pandemic, also known as the Spanish flu pandemic. This was the most severe in modern history, leading to an estimated 50 million deaths at least.

Then, we had limited understanding of the virus itself, there was no diagnostic test as we did not even know that flu viruses existed, there was no vaccine, and there were no antibiotics to treat secondary infections.

We simply did not have the necessary resources and expertise, available at the touch of a button, as we do now. Our communication tools were limited in the early days of radio, post and telegrams.

Despite these advances, we are still not where we want to be. Fatalities have been high, and the economic, social and political fallout has been significant. As technology continues to play an enabling role in health care, we will get better at predicting and preventing infectious disease outbreaks.

Through advanced data science, analytics and machine learning, our prediction models should only get more accurate, more granular and more powerful. We will be able to automatically share real-time data such as diagnostic results and disease spread via cloud services, providing the world’s scientists with as much as information as possible, at all times.

Where a disease outbreak has occurred, we will need to leverage health care communication tools in the home and promote self-quarantine. This would be via the wearable tech we will continue to use with smartphones, smart watches and smart glasses.

The format could be as simple as an alert where clear, concise actionable information with mandatory screening questions and telemedicine consultations are sent to our devices to help identify early potential cases.

As more biosensors (patches worn on the skin that can detect biochemical changes in the blood) are used, we should begin to see automatic diagnostics with the biosensor detecting the viral infection in our bloodstream before symptoms show.

We will continue to see more rapid methods for DNA sequencing, diagnostic tests and vaccine development. Artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities will churn through big data to develop vaccines even more quickly and accelerate clinical testing.

Where urgent supplies are needed, such as face masks, we will leverage 3D printing to produce these quickly and cheaply in response to demand. We will also be able to use drones to transport supplies, blood samples and vaccines even to the most remote regions.

We are on the cusp of seeing robot doctors treating patients. Indeed, the first US coronavirus patient was treated in a secure room by a robot doctor, controlled by a human doctor outside.

Technology will certainly continue to play a vital role in our response to infectious disease outbreaks like the one we are going through now. We only need to look back at our experiences to see how far we have come already.

Dr Jason Arora, a globally recognised health systems innovation leader, holds a master’s degree in public health from Harvard University and degrees in medicine and medical sciences from the University of Oxford

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