Toronto-based BlueDot, which uses big data and AI, red-flagged the coronavirus outbreak in December

BlueDot is a startup that uses big data analytics and its AI-driven product suite to track and anticipate the spread of the world’s most dangerous infectious diseases. Secretive governments can no longer hide outbreaks of contagious diseases. For instance, in 2002 and 2003, Chinese authorities allegedly covered up the SARS epidemic. That disease resulted in hundreds of deaths across the globe.

However, BlueDot’s AI-driven health monitoring platform analyzes billions of data points. Its process works something like this: It pores over global news reports, airline data, and animal disease outbreaks using natural language processing and machine learning techniques. Epidemiologists scan the outputs from the platform and sound the alert if they spot an outbreak.

BlueDot issues early warnings on coronavirus

As reported in Quartz, BlueDot alerted its clients about the coronavirus outbreak on December 31. Furthermore, BlueDot released its warnings even before those from the WHO and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Bluedot’s anticipatory skills were also on full display. It accurately predicted the spread of the virus from Wuhan and onto Bangkok, Seoul, Taipei, and Tokyo.

“We know that governments may not be relied upon to provide information in a timely fashion,” said Kamran Khan, BlueDot’s founder and CEO, to Wired. “We can pick up news of possible outbreaks, little murmurs or forums or blogs of indications of some kind of unusual events going on.”

Moreover, Coronavirus is not the first time BlueDot has pinpointed an epidemic. In January 2016, it foresaw the arrival of the Zika epidemic in South Florida.

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