How China used Artificial Intelligence to combat Covid-19
By: Awais Bajwa
Tags: Deep Learning, Healthcare, AI, Computer Vision, China Startup

2020 will go down in history books as the year that witnessed one of its kind global crisis due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Of course, Covid-19 is not the first pandemic on a worldwide scale. There had been plenty of such outbreaks in the recorded history that affected different parts of the globe. But Covid-19 stands apart due to such high international travel. It spread quickly in no time worldwide, resulting in complete lockdown in most countries. At the time of writing this article, there had been 39 Million Covid-19 cases globally and 1.1 Million deaths just within 7–8 months.

John Hopkins Covid-19 resource center (Source)

Covid-19 is also different from earlier pandemics because it’s the first time government agencies and health organizations worldwide are using emerging technologies of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence to combat the disease. AI has always been portrayed as a technology that has the potential to change the world we live in, and this pandemic was a litmus test for AI as well to prove its promise.

A fascinating case study of the use of AI to fight Covid-19 comes from China, which was the source of this virus. China had an initial surge of Covid-19 cases, but soon, it could control the spread within a few months while the rest of the world is still struggling with growing cases. If you observe the graph below, you will see a flat line for China, whereas to give a perspective, the USA and India, which also has a high population, is still seeing an exponential rise in cases.

Covid-19 cases in China vs. India vs. the USA (source)

Had Covid-19 or a similar pandemic happened ten years ago, and the above graph would have different results for China. Here is my previous article that supports this theory.

What did China do differently from other countries to combat Covid-19?

To fight with the Covid-19 situation, China relentlessly made use of AI-enabled technologies in all possible ways to control the spread, unlike other countries. The main focus area on artificial intelligence was on mass surveillance to prevent the spread and, secondly, healthcare to provide fast diagnosis and effective treatment. This should not come as a surprise because China is already one of the leading markets for artificial intelligence globally. As per one report, China’s AI market is forecasted to reach 11.9 Billion USD by 2023.

So let’s take a close look at the various measures China took with artificial intelligence.

1. Mass Surveillance & Contact Tracing

China is known to employ mass surveillance on its citizen without thinking twice about people’s data privacy. China has an estimated 200 million surveillance cameras powered by AI-based facial recognition technology to closely track its citizens. Such extensive use of AI for controlling citizens has always attracted global criticism to China.

China’s existing Mass Surveillance (source)

But when Covid-19 hit China, its already established mass surveillance system proved to be very efficient since the government could use this system to track patient’s travel history and predict which other people might be at possible risk who came in contact with the patient.

Contact Tracing App (Source)

China not only gathered people’s tracking data, but it also used this information to alert people of potential Covid-19 risk with the help of contact tracing mobile apps designed with the help of companies like Alibaba and Tencent. This app assigns color code to the users based on their risk profile. People with no risk are assigned a green color, whereas people with travel history or close proximity to other patients are given yellow or red based on the severity of the risk. The yellow color indicates self-quarantine, and people with red color are required to go to the hospital.

China’s Health Code (Source)

This health code has now become the benchmark for China to allow its citizen to use public places and services. Many health code scanners are installed in all public places like offices, subways, railway stations, and airports that screens out people for yellow or red code. China has also imposed rules to allow people to drive on roads only if their health code is green.

Man Scanning Health Code in Subway (Source)

Another very useful app for Chinese people was the Baidu Map, which gave real-time information on high-risk places so that people can stay away from those regions. It used data accessed by GPS location and medical data from health agencies to inform users about their exact distance from the Covid-19 hotspots to avoid them while traveling.

Baidu Map showing Covid-19 Hotspots (Source)

Wearing masks have become a norm for the people in 2020, and it is mandatory for one’s safety and prevents infecting others when not wearing a mask yourself. China’s AI companies like Baidu, Megvii, SenseTime, and Hanwang Technologies helped the government put up facial recognition surveillance capable of recognizing people with or without masks. The system immediately raises a security alert if it detects a person not wearing a mask. These systems are also equipped with thermal scans to raise alert for people with high temperatures in public areas. Baidu’s surveillance in Beijing Qinghe Railway Station was able to detect 190 suspected cases within a month of its installation in late January.

Facial recognition with a thermal scan at Chinese Railway Station (Source)

The most comprehensive data source for Chinese government agencies & healthcare technology companies comes from the mobile app, “weChat.” Chinese tech giant Tencent Group developed this mobile app, now have around 1.2 billion users. Tencent is Asia’s most valuable company with a market capitalization of 300 billion. “weChat” was one of the primary sources behind all Covid-19 contact tracing. When it was combined with mass surveillance data, it made contact tracing an easy task.

“WeChat and mass surveillance together provided many grounds for Computer Vision(CV) and Natural Language Processing(NLP) experts to build a paradise of revolutionary Contact Tracing applications.”

2. Healthcare Services

The major challenge which healthcare workers faced was the influx of the high number of Covid-19 cases that started coming in for the diagnosis in the early days in China. When Lungs CT scan became a parameter for initial diagnosis before PCR test confirmation, it was a nightmare for radiologists. The radiologists had to manually go through thousands of scans of people to confirm the diagnosis. Quick diagnosis and early medication/quarantine were essential to hinder the spread of Covid-19, but the diagnosis process itself became a bottleneck at that time.

Soon the Chinese AI companies like Alibaba, Yitu Technologies stepped in with AI-assisted diagnosis of CT scan images to automate the process with minimal radiologist intervention.

AI-assisted CT scan diagnosis for Covid-19 (Source)

These systems were built using Deep Learning and proved to be fast and accurate. The use of artificial intelligence to evaluate CT scans was a big turning point for China as it sped up diagnosis. Alibaba’s diagnostic system could provide the diagnosis of Covid-19 within 20 seconds, with 99.6% accuracy. By March 2020, over 170 Chinese hospitals adopted this system, with 340,000 potential patients.

On the other hand, Tencent AI lab worked with Chinese healthcare scientists to develop a deep learning model that can predict the critical illness in the Covid-19 patients, which can be fateful. They made this tool available online to be given high priority treatment well in advance.

Covid-19 is a novel virus, meaning nothing was known about it by the medical researchers when it surfaced. As soon as this came to light, researchers worldwide started to study this virus’s genes for creating a diagnosis process that could also open the gates for vaccination. But such scientific research is not easy and requires extensive resources.

Both Alibaba and Baidu have now made their proprietary AI algorithms available to the medical fraternity to speed up the research and diagnosis process. Alibaba’s LinearFold AI algorithm can reduce time to study Coronavirus RNA structure from 55 minutes to just 27 seconds, which is useful for fast genome testing. Similarly, Baidu’s open-sourced AI algorithm is also 120 times faster than the traditional approaches of genome studies.

In such a crisis, drones are often useful to either provide supplies or to carry out surveillance. But this time, autonomous vehicles and Chinese robotics companies like Baidu, Neolix, Idriverplus have also joined the mission by letting out their self-driving vehicles to supply medical equipment and foods to the hospitals.

Autonomous Vehicle disinfecting public place (Source)

Idriverplus autonomous vehicles were also used to spray disinfectants in public places and hospitals for sanitization. Another company Pudu Technology that usually build robots for the catering industry, also deployed their robots to over 40 hospitals to support health workers.

Chinese companies are also catering to global demands for autonomous robots. For example, Gaussian Robotics claims their robots have been sold to over 20 countries during the current pandemic.

Conclusion

Indeed China has left no stone unturned to use artificial intelligence to maximum advantage in its fight against Covid-19, and some might question why other countries were unsuccessful in doing so. One of the main reasons China was so successful was its relentless use of existing AI-enabled mass surveillance systems, which does not consider people’s data privacy. It is quite normal for China to use facial recognition to track citizens, but data privacy is a serious issue in other parts of the world where such surveillance systems cannot exist at such a large scale. Although there had been uses of artificial intelligence in the healthcare area in many parts of the world, no other country could implement mass surveillance to restrict Covid-19 spread as China did. Thus China went ahead in the race to control Covid-19 leveraging AI.

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