BlueDot

BlueDot is a Toronto-based AI company that tracks, contextualizes and anticipates infectious disease risks. Their products aim to help governments, hospitals and businesses protect employees and customers.

Using AI, BlueDot searches more than 100,000 articles per day in 65 languages to find news about more than 150 diseases. The company conducts surveillance in official sources reported by government agencies, public health and healthcare community, online forums and world media. Experts at BlueDot also sift through information and review findings. When a potential threat is found, it is connected to world air travel data to predict and map places where the outbreak might spread. BlueDot’s system identified an article in Chinese on Dec. 31, 2019, about “pneumonia of unknown cause” that turned out to be the novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV outbreak. The coronavirus strain has more recently been renamed SARS-CoV-2 with the disease called COVID-19 (coronavirus disease). BlueDot issued an alert to its clients almost one week before the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization issued their public alerts. The company published their analysis of the likely destinations for spread of 2019-nCoV (SARS-CoV-2) in the Journal of Travel Medicine.