For all its promise, Big Data wasn’t able to stop the coronavirus outbreak from becoming a global pandemic, but more and more tech giants are starting to realize they have a role to play in helping governments and citizens track the accelerated spread of the disease.
Microsoft, whose Redmond, Washington, headquarters is right in the back yard of the country’s worst outbreak, is using its Bing search engine to map out and track COVD-19 cases around the world.
The free tool uses data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, and Wikipedia. It’s regularly updated and lets you track total cases, active cases, recoveries, and deaths by country and state. As of this morning, the tool showed 172,730 cases around the world and 77,776 recoveries.
If there’s any bright spot in the data, it shows that some countries that have been dealing with the outbreak for a longer period of time, like China and South Korea, which now have more recoveries than active cases.
According to Harvard Medical School’s coronavirus resource center, most people with mild cases of COVID-18 recover in one to two weeks, while more severe cases could take six weeks. Those figures could change, however, as health officials learn more about the disease.
You can check out Microsoft’s coronavirus tracker here.
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