As the world braces for the latest viral health threat — the Coronavirus that broke out in China over the last few weeks — a team of developers have designed a tracker to help health care and life sciences clients keep tabs on the outbreak.
Acoer, an Atlanta-based developer of blockchain-enabled apps, has built a tracker using its HashLog data visualization engine to gather real-time information on the Coronavirus. The Coronavirus HashLog dashboard interacts with Dallas-based Hedera Hashgraph, a distributed public ledger launched in 2018, to give researchers, scientists and journalists information on how the virus spreads and trends over time. The tracker uses public data, including data from the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, both of which have been keeping a close eye on the dangerous outbreak and conducting a majority of the research on the virus.
“There is a growing supply of data about the virus, but the information is not necessarily easy to visualize, consume, or extract in a simple way,” Jim Nasr, CEO of Acoer, said in a statement. “With HashLog our objective is to make data collection automated, and data visualization rich, dynamic, and intuitive. Particularly with my own public health background and tenure at the CDC, we are also huge believers that supporting public health is an incredibly important mission and as much as we can do, it is our responsibility to innovate to enhance it.”
The Coronavirus HashLog allows users to see visual data and trends live. That includes confirmed cases, deaths and recoveries per hundred infections, trends over time, interactive views with sort and filtering capabilities and the ability to download or extract directly from visualizations.
“Healthcare and public health is a key area where Distributed Ledger Technologies can provide computational trust, and serve as a source of truth for multiple parties to work from, delivering consistent, factual information across distributed communities,” Mance Harmon, CEO of Hedera Hashgraph, said in a statement. “Acoer’s work to make this Coronavirus data so easy to visualize and understand is a great example of this, and we commend them for this innovative use of DLT for the public good.”
Pablo Peillard, a developer at Hashing Systems familiar with the tracker, told Atlanta Inno that Hedera Hashgraph is creating a federated cloud under a token.
“The companies governing this platform range from household names like Boeing, IBM and T-Mobile to international companies like Tata Communications and Magazine Luiza,” he said. “It’s a really fast platform built with the same type of software that powers billions of transactions at Lyft. In essence, it is able to notarize millions of records at a much faster rate than current blockchains which open up a lot use cases.”
The 2019 Novel Coronavirus was first detected in Wuhan, China, causing an outbreak of respiratory illness. The CDC reports the outbreak most likely came from a large seafood and animal market in Wuhan, with a high potential the virus spread from an animal to humans. Since the initial outbreak, the growing number of patients have not had exposure to animal markets, which indicates the spread is now occurring from person-to-person.
According to the Coronavirus HashLog, there are more than 20,500 confirmed cases of the Novel Coronavirus in nearly 30 countries, including 11 confirmed cases in the U.S. The virus has killed 426 people as of Tuesday morning, making the rate of mortality by 100 infections 2.07%. The number of deaths from the Coronavirus has surpassed the death toll of the SARS outbreak in the country in 2002 and 2003.
Officials are warning the virus has the capabilities of becoming a pandemic — a continuous epidemic on two or more continents.
