How You can Fight Corona

#life #watercooler

I live in Istanbul (Turkey), a very crowded city that I am afraid the virus is already all around and just nobody is reporting any case.

Every single day, the amount of people using masks in public is just increasing and this just reflects the amount of increasing fear 😨

Just 2 cases have been confirmed positive here, and directly you see this happening:

source: cumhuriyet.com.tr

Mild

This is the main problem of the outbreak... yes, you heard that right: the majority of the Corona cases are mild!

You might say that the virus being mild is a good thing... not quite actually, people with mild or no symptoms are travelling around and spreading the virus to a level that it became pandemic.

The problem gets even worse when every country is hiding the actual numbers fearing that it will affect the economy 😕

Things Getting Ugly

Let's look at the numbers:

The mortality rate initial estimate by the World Health Organization (WHO) is 2%
The world population is 7.7 billion which is 7,700,000,000
Suppose that 30% of the world population gets infected that is 2,31 billion people or 2,310,000,000
Now with 2% mortality rate, it means that 46 million people or 46,200,000 are gonna be dead by this virus!

Now I think you can see why you shouldn't treat this virus as the seasonal flu, and remember that loved ones might be included within these numbers.

What Developers Can Do

Here are stuff you can do:

Engage with any contribution to find a cure using DataScience/AI.
Adopt remote working culture in your company/organization.
Encourage and help people from other industries to adopt remote working culture.

I hope there was some better data than the 2019 Wuhan Coronavirus data in this link, because that would let everyone contribute...

I am sure with the right set of data and AI techniques we would be able to answer to questions like:

What characteristics make kids less than 10 years old not being affected by this virus?
What characteristics make some people get recovered and some others dead?

Actually, what human beings need now is not a fancy dashboard to track the virus, we need a fu**** cure!

Top comments (3)

Tim Ryan • Mar 15 '20

I'm currently in quarantine for unrelated reasons but my wife and and close friends are all taking steps to limit their exposure, including working from home, cancelling meetings and rescheduling projects. We all have people we know who are at higher risk, and do not want to risk being a vector for the virus to reach them, or each other.