PREVENTION THROUGH INNOVATION 

The sudden emergence and rapid spread of a novel coronavirus, now called Covid-19, is a reminder of the power of infectious diseases. It also offers insights into how innovation and technology are better equipping us to handle public health emergencies and contain the spread of diseases.

Facebook has generated maps that display population density, demographics, and travel patterns, enabling researchers to decide where to send supplies or how to mitigate an outbreak. Similarly, Facebook, Google, and Twitter are working to identify and eliminate misinformation about the coronavirus, directing users to reliable sources at the CDC and WHO.

INNOVATIVE APPROACHES AGAINST COVID-19

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has also proven effective in advancing public health. BlueDot, a Canadian company, uses AI to scan 100,000 online articles in 65 different languages daily for public health information. This approach was so effective that the company was able to alert clients about the coronavirus before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization alerted the public.
Innovation is also improving how we care for those people sickened by infectious diseases. During the West African Ebola crisis, tech innovations in protective gear for caregivers and smartphone thermal imaging apps helped detect irregular body temperatures.

Blockchain is an innovation that can help Streamline the medical supply chain, ensuring that doctors and patients have access to the tools they need when they need them and preventing contaminated items from reaching stores.

As we’ve seen in the wake of natural disasters, DRONES can deliver medical supplies to remote or quarantined areas. This could be critical to controlling infections by keeping some health workers out of hot zones. 

Drones can also move faster than ambulances in crowded, urban areas.

Supply delivery by drones is one of many innovations from the global tech community that can help confront the coronavirus pandemic.

Similarly, hospitals and airports are using technology to monitor patients and disinfect facilities. Biosticker measures an individual’s temperature, respiratory rate, heart rate, and coughing — the symptoms of coronavirus — and can transmit updates every 10 minutes. Germfalcon, a germ-killing robot with strategically placed ultraviolet-C lamps, was developed to sanitize airplanes from most viruses on surfaces and in the surrounding air.

These advances show the great things that can happen when medical expertise and tech innovation are brought together.

It calls on tech companies around the globe to develop innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing problems.

The coronavirus outbreak is one of many public health crises we will face in the coming decade. But with the right minds on the job and plenty of collaboration, we can create a world that’s up to the challenge of meeting them.

Prevention And innovation for post-pandemic

It is a difficult exercise, certainly not only for me but for anyone who wants to take the road of putting together a cogent reflection about the world after the pandemic that, like an immense tornado, has upset the whole world and it is still upsetting large parts of it.

Observing what is going on in this unusual summer in Europe, on one side we hear people asserting that nothing can be the same as before, and on the other, the collective behavior seems to show that basically, we are all eager to go back to “normal,” - as I like to say - “put our feet back in the old shoes.”

New Normal

- Prevention: the system of measures to assure protection in case of predictable events with a negative impact on people and the environment.

- Innovation: methodology to activating first of all the detection of unmet needs and the consequent stimulus of realizing products or services satisfying them.

- Pandemic: an infectious disease widespread over a whole country or the world.

- Healthcare infrastructures: the complex system of healthcare assets, including hospitals.

- Systems Analysis: a method to study complex technical, social, etc. problems breaking them down into basic elements, of which the important part is then to evaluate their interrelations.

Introduction of changes and study of the effects make SA an important programming and planning tool for complex realities.

- The urban way of living and quality of urban life: determined and affected by situations and conditions internal and external to the area.

Urban planning deals with the physical layout of human settlements, that is, it concerns the development and design of land use and the built environment, having the goal to improve the quality of life of the planned area.

In a prevailing atmosphere of uncertainty, it is understandable that the old normal seems an appealing refuge-port, almost unconsciously rejecting the recognition that it doesn’t, it cannot, exist anymore. If there is one consciousness acquisition that should remain in our memory forever is that health is the most precious asset we have.
Changes are necessary and we need to first embrace collective actions for a different, more respectful/balanced way of living on our planet and the necessity of rediscovering parameters of higher human qualification as persons and as members in our global community.