“Just stay at home.”
Last night, President Rodrigo Duterte once again address the nation as he expanded the community quarantine in Metro Manila to include the entire Luzon–home to more than half of the country’s 107 million population.
His message was very clear, but also quite complicated.
The President went off script (again,) mumbling at times as he tried to desperately explain in the simplest terms the gravity of the situation appealing for understanding.
Luzon Lockdown
With the enhanced quarantine in place, work in many sectors has been suspended as well as all mass transportation until April 14. The only ones exempted are businesses, services and activities related to the production or provision of food, medicine and health, banking and finance, public utilities and mass media.
The expanded community quarantine comes just two days after the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the country reached 142 and claimed the lives of 12 people.
The enhanced community quarantine comes with more stringent measures in place such us strict home quarantine for all households; regulation of the provision of food and essential health services; and the heightened presence of uniformed personnel to enforce quarantine procedures.
According to reports, if implemented fully, the PH quarantine would be among the strictest in place in Asia. I think we we’re already a bit late to declare a lockdown and the expanded quarantine is necessary, knowing that Pinoys often test the limits and boundaries and ignore the warnings unless it is their own family members that are affected– Just look at the streets still filled with people.
I know, there are lots of Pinoys who survive on their daily salary, and worry about how they are going to feed their families, but the reality is, unless everyone cooperates, this lockdown could last much, much longer. And if we don’t succeed in stopping the spread of the corona virus, and a lot more people get sick and infected there might not even be an economy to go back to.
Malacañang assured the public that the country has enough medical supplies for health workers handling the patients and that 20,000 testing kits are coming in to enhance the reporting of confirmed cases.
Tech for Good, Tech4All
As bloggers, my partner and I were already avoiding events long before the first case of COVI19 was reported in the country. We’ve decided that staying home is a better than risk exposing ourselves to the virus which would eventually put our own families at risk. Instead we’ve been reading and sharing legit news sources and tips to our families via our chat groups.
The other day, I came across this article about AI-assisted diagnosis for Covid-19. This service, developed by Huawei, utilizes the powerful computing capability of their AI chips to output the quantization result of a single case in just seconds.
We all know that the corona virus was traced back to China and they immediately quarantined Hubei province and several other areas to contain the virus.
A few days ago there were no new cases reported and they are now starting to recovery from the outbreak.
In its official diagnosis and treatment solution released on February 4, the National Health Commission of China included CT features of COVID-19 as the clinical diagnosis standard for COVID-19 in Hubei Province.
As part of Huawei’s not for profit program called Tech4All, the company said it is willing to donate and help Philippine Hospitals who is willing to learn and use the system. Using technology for Good, Huawei is offering the AI-assisted medical image analysis service for designated hospitals for FREE.
With the current situation this is definitely something our government health officials need to look into and utilize if needed.
AI-assisted diagnosis for Covid-19
Huawei recently worked to develop and launch an AI-assisted quantitative medical image analysis service for Covid-19. The tech giant jointly worked with Huazhong University of Science & Technology and Lanwon Technology.
With Huawei Cloud’s leading AI technologies such as computer vision and medical image analysis, the service can automatically, quickly, and correctly output CT quantification results.
This alleviates the shortage of imaging doctors who can accurately diagnose COVID-19, relieving the pressures of quarantines, and reducing the heavy workloads of doctors.
Huawei Cloud has been working with various industries to carry out multiple AI-based scientific research projects on COVID-19 and has released the results of ultra-large-scale computer-assisted drug screening together with many scientific research institutions.
They also worked with Yiwise to provide an intelligent, voice-based epidemic follow-up system for various organizations and institutions for free.
Huawei is offering the AI-assisted medical image analysis service for designated hospitals for free. In the future, it will continue to upgrade the diagnosis assistant system for all lung diseases (including pneumonia, lung nodules, and lung cancer) to implement early screening and treatment.
The service utilizes the powerful computing capability of Huawei Ascend series AI chips to output the quantization result of a single case in seconds. “AI + doctor review” is dozens of times faster than manual quantitative image evaluation, which greatly improves the diagnosis efficiency.
The “AI + CT” medical image analysis service for COVID-19 is developed and constructed based on the Huawei Cloud EI Health-medical image analysis platform. The platform uses the AI Ascend cluster service and the ModelArts one-stop AI development and management platform to implement one-stop medical image data governance and labeling, model training and evaluation, and visualized rendering, providing powerful support for universities and hospitals with massive AI computing, platform, and algorithm power.
For more information about Huawei Cloud’s COVID-19 fighting progress, visit:
https://www.huaweicloud.com/intl/en-us/product/eihealth.html
