Forecasting the Trend & Growth Of COVID-19 with Cloud Computing & ML

The sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 has shaken the whole world completely; and as the number of cases keeps increasing at an exponential rate, scientists are toiling day and night to get a better understanding of this pandemic to curb its spread.
Researchers say that cloud computing and machine learning techniques can be applied to study the trends of COVID-19.

What are the objectives of this study?

A model developed with the techniques of machine learning has been used for this study to determine and forecast the characteristics of the virus. The mathematical process used for this involves following the Generalized Inverse Weibull distribution and when a prediction framework is combined with this, the resultant generated is found to be a better fit. Furthermore, this ML-based model has been deployed in a cloud computing environment so that the real-time spread of the virus can be tracked more accurately.

What does evidence suggest?

As we all know, the first case of COVID-19 originated in Wuhan, China in late December of 2019. From then it started spreading rapidly to the rest of the world, and till now it has affected over 196 countries. A few months later, WHO declared it to be a pandemic, and even now the virus is creating new record cases of infections every day. Modern evidence shows that the difference between COVID-19 and similar kinds of viruses like MERS and SARS is that COVID-19 spreads very speedily, leaving more than 20% of the population as asymptomatic COVID-19 carriers.
Studies have already indicated that the coronavirus poses a greater risk for elderly patients suffering from ailments like cancer, neurological problems, diabetes, and so on. But it is no less dangerous for individuals having a weaker immune system.

How do researchers aim to improve the situation?

Nonetheless, the effects of COVID-19 are proving to be fatal for a considerable percentage of the population, and under such circumstances, the best solution is the invention of a curative drug or vaccine. But until that happens, the infection can be subdued or slowed down with the help of social distancing.
But social distancing alone is not enough; we need to gauge the spread of the infection more effectively, for which scientists are trying to build an effective mathematical structure.

During the current times, a huge demand has been found for advanced tools and solutions to create, source, optimize the big data of the continuously growing number of cases. Not only data from the healthcare facilities, but big data collected from the online behavior of individuals can also be analyzed to find the intensity of the growth of the virus. After determining the rate of growth, experts can collaborate their findings with hi-tech tools like AI and machine learning to predict where and when the infection has a high probability to spread soon. This would be extremely helpful to the healthcare facilities as they would be prepared to arrange for necessary resources to treat patients in the containment zone.