Tech in Covid-19
The first case of Covid-19 aka corona virus was detected in the month of December in Wuhan,China and the outbreak was declared a pandemic on 11th march 2020 by World Health Organization. Since its inception the disease has affected approx. 5 million plus people across the world and led to more than 318,000 deaths (check out the live meter here). The disastrous effects of Covid-19 outbreak have forced all the governing bodies and institutions to force lockdowns . These lockdowns have caused a great social and economical impact on the society. We will have a look at some of them, the ways in which technology is helping us cope up with this situation and what will be its impact post pandemic. Also we will have a look at how tech is being used in healthcare to fight covid-19.
Remote working technologies:
The lockdown has brought the world to stoppage leading to the downfall in business activities. The economical loss due covid-19 is expected to be in trillions of dollars for most of the countries . But it would have been even worse if it weren’t for tech. Remote working technologies like Zoom(privacy concerns…great topic of discussion for our next blog),Google meet and other such platforms have kept the functioning of IT industry as smooth as possible . It has been so smooth and impactful that some Multinational companies like TCS are thinking of adapting the work from home policy for their major workforce(around 75%). Remote working technologies have been the torch bearer in the educational field also. Online classes are being conducted on a large scale .The scale to which the usage of these applications has shot up can be figured out from the following statistic. Zoom’s market capitalization has skyrocketed to $48.8 billion which was just $623 million last year and is now worth more than 7 biggest airlines.
Supply of essential goods(logistics): The lockdown has brought all the supply chain activities to stop as the virus spreads via human touch. Technology like robotics and drone delivery have made this transition smooth and flawless. Robots are helping us achieve the motive of contactless delivery thereby preventing the spread of virus. Checkout the short clip of robots delivering the packages here. Robots and drones are being used to deliver medicines,sanitize the workplace and also in factories to manufacture essential goods.According to report by GPS world drones can improve the transportation speed by 50% with the added advantage of containing the virus. Drones are also being used for patrolling, observe crowds and identify people not taking preventive measures.
Contact Tracing:
Contact tracing technology has has helped to tone down the effectiveness of the virus. In fact two tech giants Google and Apple partnered to bring this technology into action. The Singapore government has launched an application called TraceTogether to contain the spread of the pandemic. Similarly many other countries have followed the same approach to contain the virus.
Healthcare:
Use of AI in healthcare is no breaking news. AI systems are being used to study the virus & to develop its antibody. But there were some new use cases too. Geospatial technologies were used in China to constantly monitor construction of hospitals & to monitor the need of important resources. The republic of Korea has been so far successful in containing the spread of virus and they have given all its credit to AI which helped them to manufacture testing kits on a large scale in a short period of time.
Online doctor consultation apps have observed big boost in traffic during the covid-19 pandemic.
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Other notable news around tech:
- While the world is facing economic slowdown tech giants like Amazon,Facebook have seen a huge increase in the number of people using their platform. The fact is evident from that following statistic .”Jeff Bezos has seen a notable increase of $24 billion during the pandemic” & “Mark Zuckerberg is now the 3rd richest man in the world “.
- While other companies are on the verge of laying off their employees Amazon has stated that it is going to hire 50,000 employees in India itself.
- Netflix gained around 15 million plus subscribers in the first 3 months of January.
- Covid-19 and lockdown have also accelerated business for online gaming platforms.
- WHO conducted a virtual round table with leading tech giants to help advance WHO’s collaborative response to covid-19.
Impact:
- Adaption of work from technologies may become generic in IT companies
- Drone deliveries may replace in person deliveries which will for sure increase the rate of unemployment
- Robots will take over the place of humans in factories and workplaces
Code twist:
For all the python geeks out there……the huge,supportive and lovely community of python enthusiasts have developed a package called “COVID19Py” to get the latest count of the cases across the world by country codes.
#prerequisite "pip install COVID19Py"
import COVID19Py
covid19=COVID19Py.COVID19() location=covid19.getLocationByCountry("IN")
location_data = location[0]
virus_data = dict(location_data['latest'])
print(virusdata)Hope you all are safe and enjoyed reading this blog . Please let us know new ways how else can tech be used in covid and what will be its impact post pandemic. For more such content follow us on Instagram and telegram . Until then stay tuned and stay safe.
Originally published at https://highontechs.com on May 26, 2020.
