Abstract
At the end of 2019, a new coronavirus was reported in the form of unknown pneumonia: It was the beginning of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. It is crucial to develop the strategies to manage this new pandemic in order to improve their effectiveness, as opposed to the ones adopted in 2003 during the SARS pandemic. In 17 years, new digital technologies and tools have been created; therefore, we can take advantage of them in the social management of the pandemic. The aim of our paper is to evaluate how blockchain technology can be used and what advantages it brings in managing an emergency situation such as of the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, the effects of the adoption of this technology will be assessed when applied both to the management of the information flow between health infrastructures, and to track monetary, technical, and medical supply donations to hospital structures. We therefore propose a high-level, decentralized architecture that assists in administrating large-scale information and stores the gathered data in a blockchain supervised by the authorities. The distrust suffered by institutions today, the fear experienced in the last year due to the pandemic, and the birth of a technology that allows for the creation of reliable networks, pose thoughtful challenges to be faced to recover trust and hope for the future again.
Highlights
In December 2019, some cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology were notified to the World Health Organization (WHO) Country Office in China
We briefly introduce and explain this technology and shortly review its most relevant characteristics, which will allow for a better understanding of how we intend to employ them in our software architecture application [31,32]
Blockchain technology is used in three different scenarios to support
Summary
As the world population grew larger and diseases spread, affecting various regions of the planet and becoming a threat to the population, the need arose to start documenting the first pandemics. These pandemics have often transformed the societies in which they appeared and have almost changed or decisively influenced the course of history. A few weeks later this unknown pathogen was identified as part of the coronavirus family and named SARS-CoV2. The novel coronavirus epidemic, caused by the COVID-19 disease, expanded in a few weeks throughout the entire world, with an increasing number of infected people and deaths. According to the observed spread of the infection, it was understood early that there was an urgent need to develop more efficient ways to manage activities in order to contain the disease’s potential devastating effects
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