New COVID cases are picking up again in Florida, triggering concern the state will get hit with a winter wave like it has the last two years.
Previously, cases picked up right after Thanksgiving and surged to a peak in mid-January.
Now, Florida researchers believe they can get ahead of COVID waves by building an algorithm to spot new variants of concern before they spread.
“Imagine if we could get ahead of the curve,” said Marco Salemi, a professor of experimental pathology at the University of Florida. “Using artificial intelligence, we can learn patterns from a massive amount of data that are not easily distinguishable to the human observer.”
The researchers are taking publicly available information from a global database where scientists upload the sequences of the COVID virus from positive test samples. Their goal is to design an algorithm — a set of computerized instructions or rules — that would comb the data and find new variants that pose a threat.
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