National Geographic Challenge - Matthew

Small scale graph of different combinations and their hospitalization/death rates.

Inspiration

My inspiration for this project was the Covid-19 pandemic currently going on right now. The pandemic has already resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, so I wanted to come up with a solution.

How to flatten the curve

Looking at some of the countries that were sucessful, we can find that the cause for flattening the curve was more testing. In many locations around the world, testing is limited. This job can be taken by kids.

Why kids

If you look at the death rates by age, you will find that kids and young teens have a much smaller death rate compared to older adults. Kids have death rates of under 0.5%. When you look at older people, it is exponential. Young adults and people that are middle aged (18-50) have a death rate of 2.5%. Seniors’ death rates are even worse, with their death rates being as high as 17%. When you look at the people that have died because of corona, over 80% of deaths are seniors, while people aged 19 or younger have had practically no fatalities or hospitalizations in the U.S. so far. This makes them the safest people to test others for coronavirus.

Empower kids through culture of risk taking

It is important to have kids or young teens feel empowered to change the world and have a positive impact on their community because this would enable them to have the freedom and authority to innovate and design. In three words, trust, decision making and risk taking. You have to trust them to make their own decisions and allow them to take risks and fail. You can instill a culture that failing is learning and encourage them to fail fast and learn.

Why the need of Geography

To have the right information, we would have to find real-time data from all over the world. However, we need to know precisely where and also the geographic features that might affect our data. We will need geography to make the intricate connections between various countries.

Why the need of Technology

Once we have our data, we can elaborate and consolidate our massive amount of data. However, there are so many variables, such as age, race, gender, occupation, poverty, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease, hypertension, cancer, obesity, and people with no pre-existing conditions. There are thousands if not millions of different combinations of variables that it makes it impossible to make these connections manually. With the use of our prediction platform, we will be able to find our answer much faster.

How it Works

For each combination, our prediction platform plots it on a graph, finds a best fit line, and we repeat it for every combination. After this, we compile our data and employ deep learning neural networks which are trained to dive deeper into the data sets to find more sophisitcated trends and patterns. Using this information, the country and government can create the appropriate systems for different people, depending on if they are least at risk or if they are most at risk. For example, we can preemptively protect and help the people most at risk and make sure they are taking the right percautions to stay safe.

Next Steps

In the future, we must work with hospitals to develop an infrastructure to enable young people to play a pivotal role in the testing phase of a pandemic. In addition, we will further develop a software that will allow kids, young teens, and different hospitals around the world to submit real-time data for our prediction platform. We will also train and refine our model by investigating the use of additional layers in the neural networks. This software will prepare us for a time when there is a virus that is even more powerful than Covid-19. It will allow us to flatten the curve and stop the virus before there is a significant impact on the economy.