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A great deal of COVID-19-relevant information is potentially available in the digital world.

The Internet has revolutionized the way people get in touch, work and get informed.

Despite the Internet has brought many improvements in people’s lives, some drawbacks need to be considered.

One of such drawbacks is the spreading of fake news.

Fake news seems to be a “hot topic” nowadays and its consequences more severe during this period of the outbreak.

As Covid-19, fake news is also a virus, maybe the most powerful virus in the world, that infests our lives.

Fake news is not created “just for laugh” of “by someone who has nothing better to do”.

Critical COVID19 Challenges - Why is smart screening & targeted testing important? Limited Testing Capacity Despite the fact that few countries have rolled out massive screening campaigns, most of the countries face critical shortages in terms of available tests and laboratory capacity. In the case of France, approximately 150,000 tests are performed on a weekly basis (currently targeting 500,000/week) while in Germany 500,000 tests are already performed per week.

The Challenge is looking for gamification approaches that would help in preventing the spread of Coronavirus.

Lasting changes in human behavior are likely to be required to end the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic and to live in the “post-COVID-19” world.

Gamification has been long recognized as a powerful approach to changing social behavior, including health related behavior. The objective of this Challenge is to apply gamification to changing people’s social behavior so that to prevent the spread of Coronavirus and other infections.

The urgency of the need to manage and find cures for the COVID-19 pandemic has made it necessary to share information in large volumes between national and international organizations (e.g., virus and treatment data, contact tracing, multimedia data generated by telepresence applications such as Zoom, Teams, etc.). The sharing of information will lead to the transfer of big data, which inevitably will infringe on individual privacy.

One of the longer-term responses to the COVID-19 crisis will be the creation of a series of risk assessment tools that allow early warnings about the pending outbreak of a pandemic. Some of these tools will use health-related parameters, such as body temperature. Others will be based on people’s subjective self-assessments, including headache, muscle pain, difficulty with breathing, etc.