We are living in a digital world surrounded by applications and sensors. Digital transformation turned the world into a global village and brought the concept of global citizenship. Likewise, data science and artificial intelligence changed today’s lifestyle and reshaped the future of humankind. Data science and AI (Artificial Intelligence) are playing a role in tasks ranging from simple product recommendations to sophisticated unmanned space missions. We are living in a world of the digital cloud and AI based sensors, e.g., smart devices, autonomous vehicles, social networks, online shopping portals, and digital media portals. The growth of data is enormous in today’s digital world; it provides all we need to analyze and use high speed data streams to benefit humanity. World technology leaders claim that data is the next oil in the modern digital world. If it’s so, can data science technologies help in protecting humankind against infectious diseases like COVID-19?

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic approximately one year ago as it became a global threat to human lives and economies. Dealing with infectious diseases is not new to the world. Recent COVID-19 is comparable to the 1918 flu which affected humankind massively. However, in the current digital world, data science made it possible to develop vaccines in record time and deal with COVID-19 spread efficiently.

Thanks to massive datasets generated through digital applications and sensors, scientists were able to understand the origin and trends of COVID-19 in no time. Genomic and social network data played key roles in analyzing, understanding, and devising preventive strategies in the current pandemic. Data science strategies along with modern computational technologies helped in analyzing microarray based genomic data in record time to come up with vaccines. On the other hand, real time analytics of social media helped in devising preventive strategies through health monitoring, human mobility tracking, and public sentiment analysis. This means medical expertise, data science technologies, and social studies for predictive and preventive analytics worked together for a common cause during the pandemic.

Predictive and preventive analytics need real time epidemiological models. Real-time analytics always depend on high volume of data, which needs state of the art AI to match data speed for quick decision making. These systems use a high tech computational platform mostly provided through cloud computing or cloud services like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, etc. Beside volume and speed of data, multisource unstructured nature of data (also known as data that is not centrally located) makes data science the only solution to develop infectious disease surveillance systems. These AI based surveillance systems helped in monitoring COVID-19 spread, observing the effect of human mobility, analysis of sentiment and psychological behavior, tracking of policy effectiveness, defining safe working practices, leveraging information for more automation, and creating social economic policy during the pandemic. These predictive systems basically use all kinds of digital data originated from sources like social media, medical and illness surveillance databases, public portals, travel databases, genomic and immunity research publications etc.

Use of AI in the medical field is not new in the modern world. Medical image analysis and AI based expert systems have been in use for diagnostics since long ago. In the recent pandemic, AI has been used for analyzing genomic data, generating vaccine trial studies, calculating drugs’ therapeutic effects, and simulating vaccine and drug tests for better treatment development. In addition, data science played a vital role in analyzing and visualizing pandemic spread for better resource engagement. Data science technologies opened the doors of a new era, the era of epidemiology based predictive and surveillance systems to combat infectious disease.

We can conclude that with modern data science technologies, humankind is much better prepared to deal with COVID-19 like outbreaks in the future.