Every morning when I wake, after I go through my normal early morning routine, I get on my laptop and go directly to the John Hopkins dashboard for tracking Covid-19 confirmed cases. I skip the news, social media and go straight to looking at the numbers. 40 years ago, or better yet 102 years ago (During the Spanish Flu pandemic) this would not have been remotely possible. This is a quick high-level snapshot of what technology has already enabled us to see with respect to Covid-19.

While the idea of a dashboard showing cases all over the world seems pretty simple and straight forward, the underlying technologies that make this possible have come about as a result of decades of software engineering, artificial intelligence and data processing. I’m not a medical professional or a public health expert, however I do understand data science, so l’ll delve into the tools and technologies helping our experts and officials tackle this global Covid-19 pandemic.