Data-Science Technologies used by France to Fight Covid19

Corona viruses (CoV) are a large family of viruses. COVID’19 is a new strain of corona virus that causes sickness ranging from the usual flu to more severe diseases. It is zoonotic, meaning that it was transmitted from animal to human. It is now sure that the virus can be transmitted from human to human. The 2019/20 corona virus plague reached France on 24 January 2020, when the first COVID-19 case in Europe and France was confirmed in Bordeaux. The first five cases were all individuals who had recently arrived or returned from China. On 28 January, a Chinese tourist carrying the virus was admitted to hospital in Paris and died on 14 February, making it the first death in France. As of 9 April, France has reported 124,869 affirmed cases, 13,197 deaths, and 21,254 recoveries, making it the 5th highest country by number of confirmed cases, now overtaking China where the outbreak first began. France also counts nursing home deaths. As of 8 April France, has reported 30,902 confirmed or suspected cases in retirement homes.

As society grapples with the public health and economic challenges manifesting in COVID-19's wake, businesses rushing to realign themselves to this new reality are looking to technology to help. Data analytics in particular is proving to be an ally for epidemiologists, as they join forces with data scientists to address the scale of the crisis. The COVID-19 global pandemic is creating large volumes of data, which data scientists are analyzing to track the disease, guide the response and treatments. To humans, the data from pandemics can be hard to grasp because there is a long gap between an outbreak happening and visible results in the community particularly at scale.

Already, many projects are underway using artificial intelligence (AI) and big data analytics to battle the pandemic. They can play a role across the whole lifecycle of the outbreak: from prediction, detection and response, all the way to recovery. The application Covidom was developed in record time by the organization running the Paris public hospitals. The app has been operational since 9 March, 2020 in two Paris hospitals. Covidom is an e-health application allowing suspected carriers of the SARS-CoV-2 virus or coronavirus sufferers who do not require hospitalization to bene t from medical monitoring at home. The aim is to limit travel to doctors' surgeries and hospitals which are already overwhelmed. The aim of this app is to limit travel to doctors' surgeries and hospitals which are already overwhelmed. The main objective of Covidom app is to ensure remote telemonitoring of patients not requiring hospitalization, without overloading the health facilities and general practitioners, allowing them to focus on patients in need. Covidom is available on Google Play and the iOS store. It sends a digital online questionnaire "once or several times a day". The patient can respond to the questionnaire from a computer or via the application. Depending on the answers, the application can send alerts. A medical monitoring center has been setting up since 12 March to monitor alerts. In case of emergency, the patient is asked to contact the emergency services.

France government is also working on another app this app will be used by them to track coronavirus called StopCovid. They're working on an open standard to develop contact-tracing apps. People in favor of contact tracing apps say that it would help break infection chains if you combine those apps with proactive tests and self-isolations. This contact tracing mobile app that will use Bluetooth to detect transmission chains for the coronavirus and help limit the spread. If, at some point, you are near an infected person (tested positive for COVID-19), you would be noticed. In short, the app could let a person know and encourage testing to be safe.

The French government says that there will be an app specially designed to track people living in France. They’re cooperating with the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) project meant to respect users' data, and the app will be open-sourced to encourage code inspections. That app will leverage the PEPPPT protocol as the officials are eager to stress a number of privacy protections. The PEPP-PT project currently supports centralized and decentralized approaches, which means that governments have to decide on an implementation. In a centralized system, a server would assign each user an anonymized identifier and collect data about your social interactions. Each user would be able to fetch the status of its identifier to check whether they've been potentially infected or not. It creates a single point of failure and presents risks if someone is able to match anonymized identifiers with real names.

It's not clear if StopCovid will be centralized or not. If it is, there's a risk hacker could match anonymized identifiers to real names. And like other tracking projects, there's a worry that the government might abuse the tracking technology for other purposes. There's also the question of its release. A prototype version of the app is expected in three to six weeks. That's fast by typical development standards, but it could come relatively late into the outbreak. It might end up being used to prevent a resurgence of the virus after the main outbreak passes than to deal with the illness at its peak. And that's assuming the app is released at all. The French digital sector minister, Cédric O, cautioned that the app might not reach the public if technical hurdles with

Bluetooth proves insurmountable. If it does succeed, though, it wouldn't be surprising to see a host of other countries follow suit.

In addition to the app that is currently in the works, the French government has also rolled out an official website to inform people, is encouraging telemedicine services to treat patients (such as Covidom from public hospitals in Paris), is mining aggregated data from telecom companies to understand how people move around the country and is leveraging machine learning on big data to forecast the coronavirus outbreak. In France, hundreds of makers are at work in the fight against Covid-19. Dozens of 3D printers, for instance, have been set up in hospitals in Paris to help reduce the lack of personal protective equipment but also essential parts for respirators.

 - Anza Tahrim Abbasi, Saima Safdar