The pandemic caused by the SARS CoV-2 coronavirus and the COVID-19 it causes is turning the world upside down. To a greater or lesser extent the situation is affecting us all and it is not expected that it will be resolved soon, although it is the hope that we have: that the isolation works to control the contagion and that a vaccine is discovered as soon as possible, because the Cases do not stop accumulating and the loss of life is compounded by an economic blow that is going to be brutal and that, as usual, those who have the least will suffer the most.
This being the case, while those who are on the front line playing the type, the health and primary care personnel to a greater extent, but also the security forces and those who, by working in an essential sector, remain at the foot of the canyon, in the rest of society is seeing signs, more than solidarity, reaction, and there is no lack of companies that provide money, material, and labor, converted in pursuit of need, as well as many individuals contributing their grain of sand in the most diverse.
The world of open source, of free software if you prefer, which is our turn, is also contributing its own. With this, we are going to close the week. But we are not only going to talk about what is done out there but what we can all do from home with very little effort. In the last couple of weeks, we have echoed a couple of initiatives in this regard; and if they have not been more, it has been for not overloading the monotheme.
Fortunately, there were other things to tell and on the other hand, everything is coronavirus in our day to day, so one for the other. Even so, we echoed, for example, the Hack Quarantine in which the GNOME Foundation participated or the Biohackaton from Debian, two ideal initiatives for idle programmers -if there is such a thing: few activities are more suitable for teleworking, as Linus well illustrates. Torvalds, the champion of social isolation - lend a hand. But many others have occurred, as in the rest of society, in the most diverse forms.
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| COVID-19 expansion 04/04/20 | Source: Google |
Following the programming thread is the COVID-19 Solutions Fund of the Mozilla Foundation, its open-source project support program that will provide "prizes of up to $ 50,000 each to open source technology projects that somehow respond to the COVID-19 pandemic". All in all, there are developers working for days and weeks with very different stories.
As an example, there are those who have created a terminal client to follow the evolution of COVID-19, who has created an extension for GNOME with the same objective, who is creating browser extensions ... As if the superinformation we have was not enough about the topic! But there are also those who are doing truly useful things, such as the case of Open Coronavirus, a project that is based on others, as well as others based on it, which points to where it is most needed.
Open Coronavirus
What is Open Coronavirus? This is how its managers explain it:
The Open Coronavirus project offers [..] a digital solution for monitoring, diagnosing and containing SARS-CoV-2 infections that allow quarantine measures to be applied in a controlled manner in hot spots or hot spots, thus minimizing the overall quarantine of the population, reducing the overload of the health systems and at the same time facilitating the progressive resumption of daily activity in the shortest possible time.
In essence, Open Coronavirus is based on what has been applied in countries such as South Korea and proposes a model of selective quarantines, not massive ones, in order to strictly control both the movements of citizens and the evolution of contagion. That said, it may not sound good at all, but it has proven to be successful in other territories. It consists of three applications:
- Citizen App. Mobile application for citizen collaboration and control of the spread of SARS-CoV-2: from the application, a diagnostic test will be requested and see the results of it. All citizen movements will be stored to control possible contagions and to fence the scope of action of the SARS-CoV-2 from the health authorities. It will serve as citizen identification using QR codes.
- Data control software where health and epidemiological control authorities can consult and detect movements of the SARS-CoV-2. From the software, you can see the sources of contagion, the fulfillment of the quarantine required for infected or possibly infected.
- Authorities App. Mobile application so that the pertinent authorities can read the citizen's identification QR codes in the environments they choose, as well as monitor their mobility.
Open Coronavirus is in active development and although its source code is available to anyone who wants to test it or contribute, it is a project prepared for execution by the competent authorities, in this case, the Government of Spain. At the moment, however, it is unknown if there has been any interest in this regard, but it is one of the most promising initiatives on record. All the information about Open Coronavirus, and it is a lot, on the project page on GitHub.
Folding@home
In the end, what was said at the beginning: you can also lend a hand and you don't need programming skills or a credit card. That you are encouraged to lend a little of the resources of your PC is enough. Does the SETI project sound familiar to you? It emerged more than two decades ago with the illusion of seeking extraterrestrial life and, as is evident, they have not succeeded in the endeavor. The funny thing is how it worked: you installed an application on your PC and shared part of its computing power.
Well, Folding@home is exactly the same, only that instead of chasing entelechies, it focuses on medical research and with the coronavirus crisis on top, it is diverting part of its resources to face COVID-19. These days they are supporting and promoting companies like Red Hat and SUSE and although I am not going to explain how it gets started because it requires a little dedication -depending on the level of collaboration- and this is taking longer than expected, If there is something leftover in these circumstances, it is time.
I, therefore, invite you to take advantage of some of these that you have free and pay attention to this article that they have published on the Red Hat blog, where they explain all the details, including of course how to install it (it is focused on Red Hat and CentOS, but with a minimum of interest you will have no problem installing it in the distro you use). For more information, the official page of Folding@home.
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