Data Science vs COVID-19: The Fight against the Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic completely shattered the barricade walls between nations into a unified one. The shapeless barriers disappeared as everyone joined hands in solidarity to face the invisible threat posed to the future. Although we are still not over the lurking hazard of COVID-19, the resilience of human beings has won yet again, proving that together we can overcome anything.

COVID-19 really took a big toll on the world. Hundreds of thousands of medical professionals, practitioners, frontline workers, law enforcement agents, and other countless heroes sacrificed their lives by standing as shields against the virus wreaking havoc. Countless prayers, innumerable efforts, and inexplicable services went into keeping humankind intact from the threat of the virus. Whenever there is no way to perfectly gauge the service of many individuals, we must never forget to honour the invaluable efforts of real heroes across the world. Each technological invention, such as Data Science, took part in the fight against COVID-19 from day 1 to today and will continue to do so in the coming days. Technology has never shown its back in challenging times – physically, mentally, morally, or scientifically.

Let’s take a look at how Data Science contributed to the battle against COVID-19

Predicting and alerting people of hotspots and new mutations:

As the old adage goes, prevention is always better than cure. Staying ahead of the threat is the most viable move to survive the pandemic. Every government/medical body, law and order department, and scientific institution across the world relies largely on Data Science to study and impart new trends in COVID-19 across the world. Each with a more transferable rate, COVID-19 has undergone many mutations since its advent. With Data Science at their disposal, health practitioners and government bodies around the world created global surveillance dashboards to keep an eye on the pandemic and stay ahead with possible vaccine upgrades such as booster doses, etc.

The After-Life:

Unless we can go back in time and prevent the COVID-19 pandemic from occurring, the world’s only practical option right now is to coexist with the pandemic. Data Science is the stand-alone tool to make that evolution happen by paving the way for safety measures in workplaces, mass congregations, and mundane daily life measures. The estimation of safety measures and revoking of mandatory laws that comply with protection are governed remotely with the use of Data Science in all countries, states, towns, etc.

The Red-Flags:

Identifying the imminent threats posed to individuals plays a key role in curbing the number of cases. Additionally, having sustainable information on what can make someone more susceptible to severe illness and how various treatment options might affect patient outcomes helps identify people who are most at risk. For instance, using machine learning, health practitioners have been able to categorize and forecast who is most likely to be immune to COVID-19 and who belongs to the 20% at-risk category. The accuracy of public health actions, pre-preventive measures, and policies was increased with the government’s foreseeing capacity.

Approval of legal policies:

Despite being powerful bodies of government, politicians and scientists cannot solely predict and implement the measures in particular areas corresponding to the growth of pandemics. That’s where Data Science plays a central role in bridging gaps between words and actions through legal policies and methodological laws.

Product Quality And Safety:

The COVID-19 pandemic wiped off the itch of going outdoors in groups on a massive scale. Pre and post-COVID stats have reported a whopping 85% of people preferring home-delivery over going-out strategies for essential products like medications, edibles, groceries, etc. As the reliance on delivery increases, the aspect of product safety and quality compromise may come to light as the practice increases. To ensure product quality and facilitate it rightfully, Data Science aids at every step through the logistic chain with live monetization to keep the products in optimal condition before reaching consumers.

Filtering Scientific Literature:

There is an ocean of information clogging up data sets across the world about the pandemic and its variants. Accurate COVID-analytics not only drives precautionary campaigns but also contributes majorly to developing vaccines efficiently. Data Science acts as a liable filtering agent to tackle information from open-source datasets. It is essential to understand that there are approximately 400,000 publications on COVID-19 and SARS COV-2, which makes the process very tough for the administrators to derive a definitive conclusion from. However, with Data science in the picture, serving as a semantic search engine, scientists are now effectively deriving information from the large pile to channel the analytics into productive solutions.

Conclusion:

Data science, in unison with statistical analysis, computer science, and computational biology, is driving applications from epidemiology to drug discovery and molecular design for therapeutic purposes. In every battle against an invincible force, data/information is the key to overpower the threat. Data Science offers a fair advantage by offering deep insights into analyzing, counter-attacking, and forecasting risks. When clubbed with mathematical and predictive models, it will also offer a clear depiction of avoiding risk factors and incentivizing a new model to co-live with the endemic.

Data Science is a cornerstone of many resourceful inventions that have largely benefitted humankind. With top gamers aiming to hire more professional data scientists from every corner of the world, this period makes this the most appropriate time to introduce data science into their lives for a successful career.

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Read our latest blog on “The Role of Data Science in Disaster Management”.