What coders can do to save lives during a coronavirus outbreak

The world may be on the heels of a coronavirus outbreak. If so, large numbers of people will need to be hospitalized. These people will need to be intubated and put into ICU. If the number of sick people exceeds the capacity of the hospital system, the mortality rate will rise when people cannot get these services.

So what can you do as a coder? Stop trying to teach yourself genetics and biochemistry to analyze the virus. You won’t make a difference in time by doing this. Rather, what we need is more real-time information about each hospital including the number of beds and ICUs available on our smartphones. Only with this information, can we make informed decisions about which hospital to go to during the midst of an outbreak. I, for one, would download an app that would tell me about the status of my local hospitals.

I suspect there will need to be a degree of crowdsourcing to get insider information about each hospital. Medical staff will be too busy to provide this information. Perhaps data can be scrapped from social media to determine when a hospital has reached its maximum capacity, allowing to be directed to nearby hospitals