A Clever Strategy to Distribute Covid Aid—With Satellite Data

Women in GIS Kenya created a digital tool that helps the government track the number of Covid-19 cases, recoveries, and confirmed deaths, as well as the number of tests administered. The online database combines a survey that assesses a person's symptoms with cellphone GPS data to create a map of current hot spots and recommend treatment locations. The government credits the tool, which can also predict high-risk areas vulnerable to future outbreaks, with helping to keep Kenya's COVID-19-related deaths relatively low compared to other countries. The tool is popular among younger, tech-savvy populations.

Using AI technology, home address data, and algorithms, the Metro21 Institute at Carnegie Mellon was able to find the best school bus routes to deliver school meals to students during the COVID-19 pandemic. The solution wouldn’t have worked with the help of a community of partners, leaders, and volunteers. “It truly has taken a village.”

In South Korea, the government is using smartphone technology, including various independent apps and text messaging, to implement contact tracing. This has enabled the country's economy to avoid a full shutdown. Early results comparing South Korea to other countries shows that this digital strategy is just as successful as implementing complete lockdowns.

A partnership between Facebook and the Ministry of Health in Kenya has helped connect blood banks with blood donors. The process uses artificial intelligence and geo-location data to notify Facebook users who have signed up as blood donors when blood banks in their area are in need of donations.

Singapore has instituted three specific measures to help contain coronavirus and cope with current isolation requirements: testing, telehealth, and contact tracing. The commonality between the three approaches is the utilization of biotechnology and research that has succeeded due to collaborative efforts between the government and tech sector.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the strain on governments to acquire more physical resources like personal protective equipment, state and local governments have also been faced with a growing need for tech resources to track data and develop platforms to share that data. Fortunately, scores of tech-savvy volunteers are lining up to help these governments, and a non-profit called U.S. Digital Response is pairing volunteers with governments.

The government of Denmark is taking drastic measures to stem the tide of economic depression already hitting parts of the world in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The government told companies affected by the economic downturn that it would pay 75 percent of their employees’ salaries to avoid mass layoffs, with the price tag of 13 percent of the national economy in three months.

Taiwan has gone largely unscathed thus far by the coronavirus, showing that their methodology of relying on civic technology has merit to be a model for other countries. Through a combination of "community initiatives, hackathons, and digital deliberation" Taiwan has been able to utilize "broad digital participation and community-driven tool development," both democratically and efficiently.

Identifying the metagenomic sequencing for new outbreaks of viruses can help to better assess how the virus is spreading, which in turn helps health officials figure out how to slow down the contagion. In the midst of a coronavirus outbreak, a tool that was first used to during the SARS outbreak is now being used to track Covid-19 in under-resourced places such as Cambodia.

Illegal fishing is a grave concern that not only threatens to destroy the ocean's ecosystem but the livelihoods of billions of people around the world who depend on stable fish populations for food. Now, software developed in a partnership between Vulcan - a private Seattle-based tech firm - and Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization allows law enforcement to quickly analyze suspicious patterns from the transponders of thousands of ships at a time, using special algorithms that automatically detect is a ship is a high-risk for criminal activity.