These inspiring yet heart wrenching words of one of the world’s most successful business tycoons could not be any more apt in these current Corona times. If we examine the preceding pandemics that the world has witnessed, it wasn’t that the global medical system that couldn’t perform its essential duties, it’s that such a constructive and efficient system didn’t exist at all.
What was lacking then that should be compensated for now?
When the world was grappling with some of the world’s most deadly pandemics and its after effects, the things that were of the utmost need were the things that were enormously missing — advanced technology and modernized medical equipment.
Even in today’s Covid situation, the need of the hour is a team of trained epidemiologists, health care experts and brilliant researchers who can come up with an effective one time vaccine or a probably cure as early as possible. But till they accomplish this mammoth task, isn’t it our responsibility as qualified engineers and competent technicians to come up with a viable solution to curb this highly contagious and fatal virus from spreading further?
You all must be thinking, how can this be done? How can this be made conceivable? Now, when you come to think of it the Covid 19 or corona virus infects one of the most vital and central organs of our body – the lungs. This pneumonia like disease damages the lungs to such an extent that in severe cases the patients have trouble breathing and have to be put on ventilator support. Most of the patients on ventilator support don’t make it.
And, even if we can reduce the contagion by staying inside our homes and not meeting people, washing our hands on a regular basis, wearing masks we cannot truly imbibe all of these practices in our daily habits. We cannot sanitize the entire world. We cannot expect masks to become the new fashion trend. We obviously cannot halt social interaction completely. That can be more harmful than the virus itself.
Wouldn’t it have been simpler if we had a solution to trace and track people from the very beginning? Wouldn’t it have been easier for us to get hold of the people, symptomatic or asymptomatic, just by checking the root cause of the disease causing virus?
What we need is a paradigm altering innovative technology which can change the face of the current Covid circumstances. A device that aims at tracing, isolating and eliminating the carriers of virus at the very grass root level. If the people carrying the virus can be traced at an early stage and thereafter isolated and quarantined immediately, way before they come in contact with so many other people, then the R0 value or the reproductive rate of the virus can be reduced by a substantial ratio.
The initial symptoms of novel corona virus may include a number of things like sore throat, dry cough, scratchy eyes and skin rashes and so on. But the reason behind thousands and thousands of deaths is lung failure. Now that means the virus, when contracted, has been working its way from the nose/throat/eyes and descending into the lungs where it ensures the maximum damage.
Manufacturers and health organizations need to work on creating just the right kind of device to isolate this virus in the lungs at a very initial stage so that disease can be stopped from spreading further at the right time.
The need of the hour is to develop an ultra-low cost, real-world, hands-on hardware device that is integrated with a real-time software. This device when plugged into your mobile/ computer or any other electronic equipment should be able to read your lungs and display an accurate real time insight upon thorough analysis. This real-time outcome can prove to be really beneficial and fruitful in tracking the corona virus symptoms even at a primary stage.
Equipping the front line Covid warriors such as health care workers, police officers and security guards, who selflessly jeopardize their own lives and health to perform their civic duties, with such a pragmatic device will not only save millions of lives but will also be of assistance in the battle against corona virus. We might be able to win this war against this common invisible enemy just by isolating the contagion at the right moment.
