The exercise made clear that the only way to stave off a catastrophic outcome would have been a global public-health system capable of rapidly detecting a nascent outbreak and responding vigorously before it could become a pandemic. Such preparedness doesn’t exist today.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/our-lack-of-pandemic-preparedness-could-prove-deadly/2018/09/19/0d7b235c-b13e-11e8-a20b-5f4f84429666_story.html
The level of preparedness doesn’t exist today...it didn’t two years ago and still doesn’t today. It isn’t a United States issue, it is a global health system issue. It just doesn’t exist
We need something health wise that functions like the tsunami sensor network we have in the pacific.
we have such a system. Voila:
Bluedot, a Toronto startup whose AI-driven health monitoring platform analyzes billions of data points. Launched in 2014, the venture alerted its clients to the outbreak on Dec. 31, well ahead of notifications from the World Health Organization and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention..
..Bluedot uses natural-language processing and machine-learning techniques to sift through global news reports, airline data, and reports of animal disease outbreaks, as described by Wired. Epidemiologists look over the automated results, and if everything checks out, the company sends alerts to its clients in the public and private sectors.
BlueDot tries to track and move information faster than the disease can travel. It correctly predicted where outside mainland China the Wuhan virus would land—Bangkok, Seoul, Taipei, Tokyo—after its initial appearance.
[don’t know why, but the wired article won’t come up for me]
https://qz.com/1791222/how-artificial-intelligence-provided-early-warning-of-wuhan-virus/
https://www.wired.com/story/ai-epidemiologist-wuhan-public-health-warnings/