COVID-19: Lessons From History

Targeted social distancing and complete lockdown are the need of the hour

- Soumya Kanti Ghosh & Bikramjit Chaudhuri

Data and analytics has been playing a pivotal role in today’s life — from recommendations on what music we might like to hear to automated re-routing by our GPS system. But how must the power of analytics be brought to the fore to negotiate with a disease that is currently threatening the health and economic welfare of people across the globe?

If we rewind the clock to the 1850s, there are two significant examples of how early pioneers in data science made incredible impact on the world. These can provide some insights into what we might see happening next.

It was 1852, and the cholera pandemic had made its way to London. Over 23,000 people had died already. To make matters worse, unbalanced press reporting led people to believe that victims were more likely to die in the hospitals than at their homes, and that doctors would kill their patients for anatomical dissection, an outcome known as “burking”.

John Snow, who is frequently described as the father of epidemiology, began to geospatially analyse the deaths that were occurring in London and isolated the source of the disease, a contaminated well that supplied water in the Soho area of London — the Broad Street Pump.

Using his analyses, he convinced local officials to remove the handle to the pump, and the cholera cases rapidly dropped, ending the spread of the disease in London.

Just a few years later, in nearly the same geography, a young nurse, Florence Nightingale, solved another significant medical problem. The British Empire was at war against the Russian Empire, and thousands of soldiers were being hospitalised. The conditions at the hospitals were horrid and the odds of surviving once admitted were less than 60 per cent.