On New Year’s Eve of last year, the artificial intelligence platform BlueDot picked up an anomaly. It registered a cluster of unusual pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China. BlueDot, based in Toronto, Canada, uses natural language processing and machine learning to track, locate, and report on infectious disease spread. It sends out its alerts to a variety of clients, including health care, government, business, and public health bodies. It had spotted what would come to be known as Covid-19, nine days before the World Health Organization released its statement alerting people to the emergence of a novel coronavirus. READ MORE