The canadian company bluedot, founded in 2013, offers communicable disease mapping services. According to founder Kamran Khan, the sars pandemic in 2002-04 was the reason for starting this business. This platform collects information from dozens of sources, such as news sites, data on animal and plant diseases, state and regional announcements, airline flights, worldwide and in various languages (social media information is not on the menu, as well as it’s considered inaccurate). The “smart” algorithms then process all this (big) data to map infection “streams”, detect cases and predict trends.
As for covid-19, it is reported that the company was the first to receive information that the situation is heading for a pandemic; it announced it on December 31, 2019, while WHO “rang the alarm bell” on January 9, 2020. This is not the first time it has made a prediction. The founder of the company, in 2008 started a research project called biodiaspora, in collaboration with the St. Michael hospital in Toronto, looking at how people “connect” through air travel. Next year, the project predicted the spread of the common flu worldwide…
“God-given” offering for the good of humankind? Before you clap: one of Bluedot’s three major financiers is co-operators… one of canada’s biggest private insurance companies.