Get America Back to Work In Steps, Using The Data We Have Now
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The Head of the Minnesota Fed Neel Kashkari said on a CBS news interview on Sunday that this could go on for another 18 months. At least this guy has the guts to say something that is closer to the truth.
Bloody hell!!!, if markets are sentiment of the “herd”, the random beatings being declared by this pandemic will result in an actual depression if that is a realistic timeline. If we take no action to get our economy going again by getting people into the workforce, allowing the immune for example to go to “Positive Places” for work and pleasure, a total collapse of the market based on fear will happen, as people remain sequestered after sixty days and start to have anxiety overtake them.
I can see it coming like a train in Switzerland perfectly timed, the masses of new money created by the Fed are not really going to help, as the proportion to what people need to survive is literally meaningless to the middle class. The money given to small businesses is simply evaporated in daily expenses to keep a sinking ship afloat. To keep bailing out the economy is not the answer, to strike a “New Deal” will not work unless people can safely move around outside once again. The formula the Government is using is simply not sustainable and will only result in a massive deficit and enormous inflation in the future.
Recent Relapses in South Korea of recovered patients don’t help either and only instill the fear of the monster coming back to offer another random beating. Senator Cassidy in an Op-ED piece two weeks back called for a registry of recovered patients to help track a part of this pandemic and help in the future others that are infected, thats a start in using data to help us get back to some form of normalcy, issue is no one has taken this up in Government, called into action a proper Bill to be passed by Executive Order, why?.
We as one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world are doing a horrific job of utilizing the technology at hand to help interlink Government and the population to give us the information to allow us to save ourselves. The old age fear of Government control in this instance must be meddled by a truce of trust. I’m a true believer in that if you give a population an open matrix without any rules, you are going to have mayhem.
As Government is there to provide protection through means such as the use of technology, one must consider an act of surveillance and monitoring of the population as a part of a new era of security. Call it a new DHS if you may, Department of Health Safety, whatever it maybe, but one thing is clear we cannot escape the creation of such an entity in America and globally to keep the health of humankind intact. The key element here is to balance the level of privacy with whats needed to be viewed in order to spot a emerging trend or to prevent a hot spot from spreading. The the notion of the usual conspiracy theorists is that this is some new form of mind body control, a horrible element used only in autocratic states. The truth is if we don't implement such a national and global system today, the population of the world will be decimated in the future as pandemics like this build up with more force.
What I would like to focus on are two main points in order to get our society back to work as well as give us the data we require at a national level to process the true trends in this outbreak to help manage the current situation and predict the next one well in advance.
The first part I’m proposing is a national database that is kept under a foundation that will have a real-time list of recovered positive patients who have agreed to donate their serum to others. This database will be national and could be used to help our first responders, others that are in critical care with a much-needed plasma transplant to help boost their immune systems. It has been shown thus far in South Korea that the plasmapheresis process in lieu of a vaccine has greatly helped recovery. This type of a Registry would be alike the Bone Marrow registry that has created in 1984 through an Act of Congress and has saved 80,000 lives thus far. The idea is akin to the National Donor Deferral registry (NDDR), which is a permeant registry of people that due to an infectious decease such as HIV cannot donate their plasma. The Covid registry will be to keep a database of possible donors are allowed and approved to donate.
The additional key factor than will be these recovered patients kept in the registry will be able to return to rejoin the workforce, as well as in case of any relapse have been on a national record that could allow us to use the data to pinpoint any change in their condition.
The second part of the process of using data will be the forecasting of the spread of the virus, geographically, demographically, and at a national and later international level through a co-joined database. This database would protect medical record privacy through an Avatar type system where only authorized users will be able to see the data which will be used of trend analysis purposes. Analysis of the data of recovered patients as well as those tested negative and later test positive would result in more targeted quarantine measures, better allocation of resources, shipment of medical supplies, allocation of hospital capacity, this shall than allow reopening of businesses and a return to work for millions of workers, and most importantly save lives.
In order to better analyze data from initial tests, which at the moment are not being used for any offensive analysis, an overlying dataset connected to the Covid positive registry should be created that is able to cross reference Lab tests of all tested patients. The US currently has a Lab Information Systems database that is kept within each individual state. This pool of critical volumes of data pertaining to individuals,Covid-19 test results, can be tied to clinical information about those in intensive care, thus give the HHS at a Federal level “one pane of glass” type of modeling to react in real time to a building trend in case a hot spot is detected or there is a relapse.
In the United Kingdom, the National Institute of Health is using large volumes of confidential UK patient information in a data-mining operation that is part of the government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak. The NHS has contracted tech companies to help build the “Covid-19 datastore”, which would give ministers and officials “real-time information about health services, showing where demand is rising and where critical equipment needs to be deployed”. South Korea, has demonstrated that aggressive testing and identification of potentially exposed persons can enable more targeted quarantine measures, while also allocating resources to areas identified as hot spots. However, scaling the South Korea model without government controls and monitoring of private personal data requires a unique approach. More robust outbreak modeling based on public data would enable authorities and medical professionals to allocate resources where they will be needed most in a proactive way, as opposed to reacting to regional outbreaks. Such predictive modeling could slow the spread and get the right resources into the right places at the right time.
Imagine if we could accurately forecast how the novel coronavirus — both its current and future outbreak cycles — and future pandemics are most likely to spread and then rapidly identify the most vulnerable individuals and communities to infection. Such knowledge would empower government agencies, healthcare providers, organizations, and individuals to take the critical first step to address the most basic healthcare needs of individuals and reduce the personal and economic toll of this pandemic and future outbreaks.
Yet currently, because of the only recent development of this novel coronavirus and insufficient publicly available machine-readable data, only few data scientists and researchers are able to develop predictive models, and their ability to forecast the virus’ spread is thus failing.
The rapid data challenges, such as creating an early warning system for future pandemics; predictive modeling for public health resource allocation; and developing more efficient and affordable diagnostics, treatments, and cures that can be produced rapidly are now key to for our government to address in order to give our population the comfort to return to work.
About Shahal Khan
Shahal Khan is an American Entrepreneur and Economist residing in Washington D.C. He is a serial entrepreneur that has invested globally for the last 22 years. He is currently a Board Member of ETT (Economic Transformation Technologies) a holding company that has investments in Artificial Intelligence, Data Security, Block chain, Education and Healthcare
