Introduction
The Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak in late 2019 caused a global health
emergency around the world . In just over three months, the number of
coronavirus new cases has escalated to more than a million worldwide.
The rapid transmission of the virus leads to new cases being reported
globally by the hour. Simultaneously, the number of deaths and
infections continue to rise quickly. Consequently, the COVID-19 pandemic
has enforced lockdowns and social distancing guidelines affecting global
economies negatively. It has led to the cancellation of many important
world’s activities, including sporting events such as the Tokyo Olympics
and Dubai Expo . As a result, government officials and scientists across
the globe have been rigorously working towards developing a cure and
predicting the potential growth trajectory of the virus since the first
few cases that were reported to the World Health Organization (WHO). In
addition to forecasting the casualties and growth of COVID-19 cases,
many reports also count the active and recovered cases collected from
national and state government health agencies along with local media
reports.
In fact, every day a new set of baffling data points are reported
concerning the number of positive and negative tests, patients
hospitalized, deaths, hospital beds occupied, ventilator shortfalls etc.
These numbers allow the officials and public to track the progress of
COVID-19 in real-time making it a data-driven pandemic . On the other
hand, these numbers pose a major problem as decisions based on such data
is often imperfect and incomplete. Thus, the introduction of tracking
apps becomes necessary and valuable to help prevent the spread of this
virus. Tech giants, researchers and healthcare officials started using
contact tracing mobile apps that use Bluetooth-based proximity tracing
or geolocation tracking functionality to help track COVID-19 cases .
Several organizations have even developed map-based-dashboards to track
information. Understanding the dynamics of the pandemic requires good
data to predict how fast the disease spreads, whether the
countermeasures are effective or not and the impact it has on the lives
of people. However, data available online may not be perfect as it is
susceptible to data manipulation.
Hence, innovative technologies such as deep learning, machine learning,
artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain could help combat the
crisis. In particular, blockchain technology has the potential to
revolutionize various industries including finance, supply chain and
healthcare sector. Blockchain is a decentralized technology with
distinct in-built features such as impenetrable information
infrastructure, transparency and cryptographic encryption tools. It is a
distributed ledger containing a chain of blocks. Blockchain’s
decentralized platform is tamper-proof due to its underlying
cryptographic technology which is used to authenticate participants in
the network. Moreover, it requires a lot of resources to be able to
modify transactions added to the blockchain network because once a
transaction is validated and verified then it gets chained to previous
transactions with a unique hash. Hence, manipulating one transaction
would change this hash and all members would be alerted making it almost
impossible to update or delete
Table 1
Comparison between using a traditional centralized platform vs. a
blockchain platform