EUvsVirus

EUvsVirus Hackathon

Certain regions like Lombardy and Alsace are hit particularly hard by COVID-19, resulting in heavily overloaded hospitals and critical care units. At the same time, the burden is much lower in other regions nearby. Would it be possible to distribute the patients more efficiently, resulting in better care for the patients and a lower burden for the health care providers?

This was the question that the MLFPM fellows Bowen, Giovanni, Maguette, Giulia, Lucas and Emese decided to answer, when the European Commission invited to participate in the EUvsVirus hackathon. The event took place on April 24-26, 2020. Participants were requested to develop tools solving COVID-19 related problems in areas ranging from Health & Life over Social & Political Cohesion to Digital Finance.

Based on existing datasets, the team developed a tool to simulate the number of patients in acute and intensive care units in all hospitals in France, including the possibility to transfer patients between hospitals to ensure a better distribution.

It was a great experience seeing a project come to life through the shared effort. On day one we just had a rough idea of what to try, on day three we had a curated github repository and an application available online.