COVIDcast Maps: Academia and the Private and Public Sectors

• May 20, 2020
• by:  RKN Global 
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Technology can help in the battle for public health.  Academia and the private sector, including social media companies, can play a role in making it available.

The Delphi Research Group at Carnegie Mellon University created a tool to track the prevalence of COVID-19 in the United States: Its COVIDcast maps cover over 601 counties in the U.S.

The data sources for the map include Google searches, Facebook surveys, doctor visits, search trends, and the influenza lab tests statistics.

Use of COVIDcast Maps

A COVIDcast researcher said that millions of responses to the Carnegie Mellon surveys by Google and Facebook users provide the team with real-time estimates of the activity of the coronavirus.

The survey results provide real-time indications of the activity of the deadly disease, which was not available previously from any other source.

These maps can help governments decide where to direct the resources like PPE (personal protective equipment), kits, and medicines.

Cooperation with Tech Companies

The map demonstrates that academia, the private sector and the public sector can work together.  Private sector tech companies like Google and Facebook, as well as private sector labs, provided the raw data for researchers to process and analyse. As a result, public health authorities have an additional tool at their disposal for making decisions about the distribution of public resources against the disease.

Additionally, social media companies can propagate the data as part of an effort to put out accurate, professional information about the coronavirus. For example, Facebook has featured the COVIDcast maps on its site.

Hospitals Must Improve Security to Combat Cyber Attacks

• May 13, 2020
• by:  RKN Global 
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Cyber criminals see health care facilities as easy prey because they often don’t have great security infrastructure in place to prevent or combat cybercrime. INTERPOL’s Cybercrime Threat Response team recently said that it detected a significant increase in the number of cyber-attacks against “key organizations and infrastructure engaged in the virus response.”

Hospitals ill-equipped to combat ransomware attacks

The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee recently said that most hospital systems are generally ill-equipped to manage data breaches and ransomware incidents, even before the coronavirus.

The situation is worse right now because hospitals are fighting COVID-19 with even fewer resources and time to combat cyberattacks. Currently, hospitals require a great deal of support from security organizations and the government to protect them against cyberattacks.

INTERPOL Issued a Purple Notice

INTERPOL said that the threat of cyberattacks is not limited to only one country. Last month, it issued a Purple Notice to its 194 member countries, warning about cybercriminals’ use of ransomware worldwide.

Several hospitals have already fallen victim to ransomware attacks.  One recent example is a Czech hospital that provided coronavirus testing.

Effect of COVID-19 on Cryptocurrency

• May 6, 2020
• by:  RKN Global 
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COVID-19 affects the cryptocurrency market just like it affects other markets. Recent research indicates that crypto markets took a U-turn in the midst of the coronavirus.

How the crisis affects cryptocurrencies

The state of emergency caused by the virus has shut down schools, businesses and borders in Europe, the US and other countries.

Researchers analyzed the market cap and trading volume of the top 100 cryptocurrencies during the period of Jan 1 to March 11.  They found that both overall trading volume and market prices hiked initially as the number of identified COVID-19 cases increased. However, this positive correlation later reversed. Investors started to pull their cash out of cryptocurrencies and the market started to fall.

The initial positive correlation between the rise in market cap and volume in cryptocurrencies and the spreading virus may indicate that traders saw cryptocurrency as an effective safe-haven asset and reliable source of liquidity.

When did the trend reverse?

It seems that the trend started to reverse when investors responded to a temporary dip in the number of new cases. When the newly-identified infections started to slow down, the traders may have interpreted a decrease in the spread of the disease as a positive sign to reinvest in traditional assets. The decrease in the investment continued even after the number of new COVID-19 cases began to hike again.