Here’s How Blockchain Is Helping In The Battle Against Coronavirus

Originating from China’s Wuhan City, Coronavirus outbreak has already claimed more than 420 lives across the world. Till date over 10K confirmed cases of the epidemic have been identified worldwide, including three in India.

While numerous welfare organisations are working together to battle Coronavirus, a Georgia-based developer of blockchain-enabled applications Acoer is providing blockchain technology to healthcare and life sciences institutes to easily track and visualise the outbreak.

Acoer’s HashLog dashboard uses Hedera Hashgraph’s technology, which is based on blockchain, to help researchers, scientists, and journalists to easily understand the spread of this deadly virus and trends related to it over time.

Using a wide set of public data, including data from the Centres for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO), the HashLog dashboard provides real-time information to track the global epidemic.

The platform provides real-time information related to Coronavirus including confirmed cases, deaths and recoveries per hundred infections, and trends over time. All this information is provided in interactive designs with dynamic sort and filtering options.

Highlighting that there is a dearth of information which is easy to visualise, consume, or extract in a simple way, Jim Nasr, CEO of Acoer, in a statement said, “With HashLog, our objective is to make data collection automated and to create data visualisation rich, dynamic, and intuitive.”

In India, all three cases of Coronavirus were registered in Kerala, which has now forced the state government to declare the outbreak as a state disaster. On the other hand, the WHO has already declared this outbreak as a global emergency. The condition is so severe that the Indian government has brought back over 600 students studying in the Wuhan province in China.

While there has been no confirmation on how Coronavirus came to the picture, it is now speculated that it is an evolved version of a virus responsible for causing Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which took the lives of 800 people around the world in 2002. Some of the experts are also arguing that it first affected bats and was then transferred to humans.

Speaking to Inc42, Sharat Chandra, MVP Hashgraph ambassador at Hedera Hashgraph, said that it’s important to have a single source of reliable information when the whole world is battling the Coronavirus outbreak.

Chandra further added that the numbers of infected individuals will rise in the days to come and hence technologies such as Hashgraph needs to lead the way for the future of public ledgers. “The platform is well poised to help developers build innovative solutions to deal with problems of this magnitude,” he told Inc42.