Covid-19 Containment: Demystifying the Research Challenges and Contributions Leveraging Digital Intelligence Technologies

Abstract

As COVID-19 is a new virus, there is no acquired immunity. COVID-19 spreads more rapidly than its earlier viruses such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and thus has the higher pandemic potential [1]. The earlier viruses transmit only with much closer contacts whereas COVID-19 spreads through droplets generated when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or speaks [2]. Also, one can be infected by breathing in the virus if he/she is within a distance of around 1 m from an infected person or by touching an infected person and then touching his/her face/nose/mouth/eyes. From the study [3], the most common symptoms of COVID-19 infection are found to be fever and cough (67.8%). In the case of earlier viruses, infected persons can infect others only after developing the respective symptoms. But with COVID-19, people who are infected with the virus can transmit the virus to others in their presymptomatic stage (i.e. just before the symptoms start to appear) due to high viral load [4,5]. In addition, recent research analyzes that people get infected with no symptoms (asymptomatic) and they too can infect others [6].As COVID-19 can spread presymptomatic stage of an infected person as well as through asymptomatic cases, testing of infected people is very important. Though Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR), a nucleic acid testing