Prediction for Decision Support During the COVID-19 Pandemic
The task known as prediction is widely applied in several different areas of knowledge, from popular applications such as weather forecasting, going through supply chain management, an increasing range of adoption in healthcare and, more specifically in e
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Prediction for Decision Support During the COVID-19 Pandemic
1.1 Introduction At the moment this book is being written, the world is facing the most significant challenge of modern history: the COVID-19 pandemic. The consequences of the outbreak cannot be precisely evaluated yet, since different countries are going through different strategies to cope with the virus pandemic and this is, obviously, generating completely different results. On the other hand, countries where effective strategies could reduce the infection rates a few months ago, are facing second and third waves of infection, indicating that this will be a long-term battle that will probably end not only when a vaccine will be successfully developed, but when the immunization will be effectively in place, with billions of people protected. The impacts are strongly significant in public health systems, with unprecedented numbers of mortality rates, exponential increasing rates of ICU occupation in short term and limited capacity of response in a large number of healthcare institutions. Additionally, when considering the perspective of the consequences of the pandemic in the global economy, the facts are also frightful and with long-term impacts, especially for developing countries and more specifically for small and medium enterprises. Societies and governments will need a long time and new strategies and actions to recover from the current outbreak minimizing the impact. The term COVID-19 is an acronym for “Coronavirus Disease 19” and is the name of the disease caused by the virus strain named SARS-CoV-2 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2), which belongs to the class of the coronaviruses. It attacks the respiratory system, but besides a common infection in the respiratory tract, several other consequences may affect the patient directly and indirectly. The immune system, for example, trying to combat the virus, in several cases generates such a strong response that affects the patient’s life. Consequences of the cardiovascular system and heart functioning are also being widely reported in the medical literature. When the virus was firstly reported in Wuhan, China and started its exponential spread, several strategies were adopted in parallel, led by general guidelines provided by the WHO (World Health Organization) and specific efforts developed by local © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. A. L. Marques et al., Predictive Models for Decision Support in the COVID-19 Crisis, SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61913-8_1
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1 Prediction for Decision Support During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Governments to deal and respond to this challenge, besides the biotechnology efforts to develop medicines and vaccines to fight against the virus action [13]. From the biomedical engineering and computer science perspective, several approaches are being considered, from the development of automatic diagnostic tools based on the application of AI (Artificial
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