Covid-19: A software company touted by Trudeau uses phone data to map outbreak

Khan at his office in Toronto, Canada. BlueDot's newest product uses geolocation information from about 400 million mobiles worldwide to extract clues on how the disease spreads within a country or if social distancing is working. It taps into officials’ growing appetite around the world to determine the effectiveness of their lockdown orders. — AFP

A Canadian software startup backed by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing picked up signs of the Covid-19 outbreak in China before it even had its name. Now it’s using mobile phone data to assist governments in their response to the pandemic.

Toronto-based BlueDot Inc’s platform was among the first to detect an unofficial report in Chinese on Dec 31 about several cases of an unusual pneumonia. That caught the attention of its in-house health experts because of similarities with the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS. Nine days later, the World Health Organisation flagged that China had made "a preliminary determination” of a novel coronavirus.