In about ten minutes well have newswatch, but first on bbc news its time for click. This week marks three months since the world first heard about a newly identified disease. I am of of course talking about covid i9, which is caused by a new type of coronavirus. To date there have been over 3,000 deaths from nearly 100,000 confirmed cases in 81 countries. And this is how i know that. This is Thejohns Hopkins University covid i9 dashboard. And since it went live injanuary, it has gone. Viral, in a good way, by demystifying the stats and the numbers behind the spread of this disease. It is amalgamation data from many of the Worlds Health agencies, and so for example right now i can see the total number of confirmed cases isjust over 93,000, these are the countries where they have confirmed cases by numbers, and just as importantly i think, this is the total number of people who have already recovered completely from the disease. And this is just one of the pop up projects that have appeared online, aiming to demystify the glut of covid i9 data. Community powered site nextstrain drops the genome data shared by scientists around the world. As covid i9 is transmitted from person to person, it can change its genetic makeup in subtle ways, allowing researchers to build a family tree. That shows how the disease has spread. Its some genuinely fascinating stuff. In a health crisis, particularly once it is growing rapidly like the coronavirus outbreak, we really need to communicate with people about what they can do individually and collectively to try and help get this under control. But also it is important that individuals understand that if they make minor, relatively mundane changes to their behaviour, they can help us to slow the spread of this down. In 2018, the bbc ran its own experiments to simulate the spread of a flu like disease using a network of virtually infected smartphones. For me, the show did a brilliantjob of revealing how simple things like washing our hands can make a massive difference to how quickly and how far a disease spreads. 0n the right is what happens if we all wash our hands really well. 0n the left, is what happens if we do not. Just look at how the spread is slowed if we follow the advice of washing our hands well and often. Post like this are everywhere on social media, recommending good handwashing techniques and other scientifically grounded tips to try and limit the spread of germs. But they are not the only things you might find if you look online for coronavirus information. Over the past few months, social Media Companies have been waging their own war against a different kind of pathogen. Dubbed an infodemic by the world health organization, social networks have been deluged with information about the coronavirus. Some of this is correct, and helpful, but a lot of it is misleading. 0r half true or completely fake. And that is making the real information or advice much harder to find. Looking through tiktok now, and it looks like any search for coronavirus or similar term now brings up this banner at the top and these videos from well known organisations at the top spot. Similarly, dubious recommendations seem to have gone, coronavirus conspiracies used be one of the suggestions search tags. Not any more. On facebook, it is a similar story with posts from well known and trusted organisations taking up the top spots. So some of the kinds of misinformation that does travel around would be first of all not believing that there is a problem at all. And that this is a creation in order to try and control people. That has been seen before. And is being seen now. Also, people come up with ideas of cures, whether it is drinking garlic water or whatever, that suggest something will happen or that there is a cure out there that it is being withheld. That is the circulating rumour at the moment. And you have to counter that because if you do not, people will not take action in the way that you want them to. So it is really important that we get the true messaging out there and the science underpinning and that is what we are trying to do. And if youre really interested in educating yourself on the Science Behind covid 19, professor ward has a free online course that should really protect you from fake facts. So that is where we are now. But in this emerging age of Artificial Intelligence, we are starting to get glimpses of how that Technology May help us in fighting outbreaks like this. And lara has been investigating. This coronavirus seems to have shaken up life as we know it. Inevitably, it is going to continue to spread. But how far and fast that is going to happen and what we are going to do about it are still in question. So could Artificial Intelligence play a vital part in providing some answers and maybe even improving the outcome . Ai had an Important Role in the initial understanding of this outbreak. Canadian specialists blue dot deals with global epidemic intelligence. And identified very early on that something was amiss through a combination of medical and airline data. We were one of the first groups in the world that identified this outbreak. This was back actually on new years eve day, the morning of december 31, the Machine Learning algorithms that we developed had picked up information and in chinese of a pneumonia, it wasnt known to be a coronavirus, of unknown cause, centred around this market in wuhan. When it was presented to our team, we recognised there were parallels to the sars outbreak 17 years earlier so we knew immediately that there was some historic parallels here and that this outbreak really warranted our attention. And this is where the human scientists were needed. Ai can alert but cannot yet do the investigations to say what is really occurring. Detecting an outbreak is really just the first step. There are multiple other things that need to happen. Ultimately we need to determine what kinds of risk does this pose, is it likely to spread . If it is going to spread, where might it go . What kind of consequences might occur from that spread . And ultimately we have to get that information into the hands of people who can then be empowered with the information to take the appropriate actions. It is notjust about tracking, though. The dream is that one day, ai might be able to conjure up necessary vaccines on the spot. 0r repurpose the drugs to deal with new challenges. The latter being something benevolent ai in london is already leading the way on. This company uses al to better understand the mechanism of disease. Correlating data on illnesses, drugs and outcomes and providing more information than any human being could ever come up with. And in this case, a potential lead. What are we looking at here . This is a demonstration of our algorithm processing documents in real time, reading the abstract of scientific publications related to coronavirus and extracting relationships between key biological concepts that we really care about to carry out the discovery. And at this point, were just a few months into an outbreak that could really, really grow. How meaningful do you think this data is so far . Theres a huge amount of information being published. We are notjust pulling out the coronavirus information. But we are merging it with other existing publications on underlying biology. 0ur algorithms reads over biology at multiple layers from the nano world of proteins interacting on ourselves through this maze of biological processes up to a human defined definition of a disease. It is very early days for the process but it is suggesting what might be worth further investigation. Now a lot of people are looking at virals, antivirals and how they might potentially treat the disease. We looked at it from a completely different way. We said what are the other types of approved drugs that might inhibit the progression of that disease in the body . So we surfaced a number of drugs and then we did some experimentation based on that. And further research. And we came up with this one drug that we think is best suited. It has both Anti Inflammatory Properties as well as the ability to stop what is called endocytosis, which is what enables the virus to enter the lungs, which is the most potentially dangerous outcome of the coronavirus. The company stresses that this is only conjecture. And although the drug in question is approved for use in rheumatoid arthritis, Clinical Trials and full Scientific Evidence would be needed before it could even come close to being used for this purpose. What we are trying to do is use this technology in the service of science to further the development of novel treatments for diseases that currently have no treatment. Like right now in the world, theres over 9000 diseases that have no treatment. Ai will play a greater role than it has already because what is being done is genetic sequences are being taken and that is the understanding of the organism itself, and this is put into data bases that can then determine for a virus came from and what it might be going in the future. Of course ai has not solved the covid 19 crisis. But it has hopefully helped to some extent, and should be learning from it to be even more helpful in any future disease outbreaks. That is it for the short cut of click for this week. The full version is up on iplayer. We are waiting for you on your social media platform of choice. Facebook, youtube, instagram, and twitter at bbcclick. Thank you for watching, we will see you soon. Hello and welcome to newswatch with me, samira ahmed. Does the extensive airtime the bbc is devoting to the coronavirus mean its guilty of scaremongering . And how can reporters provide all the information on the virus that the public needs without encouraging a sense of panic . One subject has led almost all news bulletins this week, and it seems likely to remain top of the agenda for some time to come. Heres hugh pym on thursdays news at ten, reporting on warnings that the coronavirus was likely to spread further in the uk. The warnings today have been on the basis of a worst case scenario. Case numbers may be less than expected, but Health Leaders feel they need to prepare hospitals, their staff and patients for a potentially very tough time ahead. While some viewers have applauded the way the topics been handled, with a twitter user called jonathan posting this but Chris Stapleton had a different view, asking as well as the sheer extent of the coverage, including a number of special programmes on radio and television, the frequent references to the daily toll of new cases and deaths in the uk and worldwide concerns some viewers. Heres Alan Cummings and first, alan collinson. Every day, i am hearing announcements such as three more people have been diagnosed, bringing the number infected to 90. No mention of the people who were diagnosed in the first three weeks, almost all of whom have now fully recovered. 90 is not the number of people who have the virus in the uk today, but the number who have ever had it. By this measure, you should be reporting that six billion people on earth have been infected with the flu virus a true but misleading, sensationalist and unhelpful fact. Like everyone else in this country, im concerned about the rise in cases in the coronavirus
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