The emergence of the Corona pandemic came at a time when the role of information technology and computer technology escalated, and the ranks of companies and information institutions projects, research and products rose to the top of the global pyramid in capabilities, influence and economic and scientific role.
Before the start of the pandemic, information products and computers of all sizes, capabilities and scope of work were racing against time to provide solutions and initiatives in the field of health care, so it was necessary to present what it had in the battle with the pandemic and its various effects and to employ its enormous potential to seize the historical moment.
The urgent nature of the pandemic, with caveats to movement, travel and meetings between people, necessitated the expansion of the use of non-traditional methods of data collection and sharing and expediting the extraction of urgent results, and the dissemination of information about the pandemic and its spread, medicines and their effectiveness, vaccines and symptoms, and for these considerations and with the large amount of data that was available With a rapid and intense increase, the expansion of the use of data science technology, big data, artificial intelligence, communication infrastructures and information technology was necessary and effective in the scientific achievements reached during the past two years in order to achieve basic goals of containing, stopping and controlling the epidemic.
The information war between the multiple and different orientations represented an important weapon in obtaining the confidence of the public, mobilizing supporters, isolating the skeptics, and convincing the hesitant. This required accurate and rapid information, and this is a dilemma in itself.
The resort to modern technologies in the field of disseminating information and statistics on the epidemic, presenting and analyzing it quickly, was accompanied by the declaration of the World Health Organization (WHO) about the outbreak of the pandemic, and its global recognition, then it was to benefit from the data provided by records of communication networks, mobile phones, and geographical positioning systems for the movement of people and the spread of events, The use of mobile applications was expanded to collect and share data and send alerts and early warnings of the pandemic in order to monitor, identify and besiege hot spots, and then organize the distribution of vaccines.
In addition to organized data from research, medical records, and geographic data, some applications have benefited from the data of social media platforms, search engines, and news reports in directing early warning systems and providing decision-making issues with the available information and trying to overcome the rumors, lies, rumors and misinformation that disturb these data. , and then the reliable source data were combined with irregular data in terms of design and unspecified source in order to feed smart algorithms in building and updating mathematical models of the evolution of the pandemic, estimating the effectiveness of control measures, treatments and vaccines, and predicting the evolution of the spatio-temporal spread of the pandemic using those models.
Scientific studies and academic research related to data science, artificial intelligence, and big data tried to keep pace with the circumstances and data to provide solutions, recommendations, applications and mathematical models according to the progress of the pandemic and the requirements to combat it. Some of them took care of diagnosis when the approved examination tools (PCR) were scarce through symptoms and computerized imaging, and others focused on estimating The value of the risk and its prediction, and others directed to contribute to supporting decision-making and choosing procedures according to some classifications.
The information war between the multiple and different orientations represented an important weapon in obtaining the confidence of the public, mobilizing supporters, isolating the skeptics, and convincing the hesitant, and this required accurate and rapid information and this is a dilemma in itself, so how if successful decisions were added to it, but this challenge had to be faced Balancing is on the fine rope that combines these paradoxes, and here the reliance on the speed and accuracy of computers increases to extend a helping hand to the researcher, practitioner and decision-maker when the risk is necessary, and the balance between bad and worse is urgent and urgent, and there is no space for perseverance and patience.
The reality says that the separation between the health system, practice and research is no longer isolated from information technology and computing. Technologies have become part of health operations, as the months of the pandemic have reinforced what is tangible from the fact that any modern health institution is necessarily an informational institution, with the increasing dependence on data in its various forms. In diagnosis and treatment, the blending and integration of information and health care has become a permanent process that develops through training, job structuring, and creating sites and jobs that contribute to achieving integration and merging between what is medicine, pharmacy, nursing and nutrition, and what is information, computers, systems and applications.
The standards of the health system after Corona are not the same as before Corona, and at the heart of this transformation are technologies and data sciences, computerized big data, and artificial intelligence that are integrated with all stages of health care and its operations, an era that we were slowly walking towards, but we pushed to it voluntarily and unwillingly.