Open Access

ARTICLE

Empirical Assessment of Bacillus Calmette-Guérin Vaccine to Combat COVID-19

Nikita Jain¹, Vedika Gupta^1,*, Chinmay Chakraborty², Agam Madan¹, Deepali Virmani³, Lorenzo Salas-Morera⁴, Laura Garcia-Hernandez⁴
1 Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Bharati Vidyapeeth’s College of Engineering, New Delhi, 110063, India
2 Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering, Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, 814142, India
3 Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Bhagwan Parshuram Institute of Technology, New Delhi, 110063, India
4 Area of Project Engineering, University of Córdoba, Córdoba, 14071, Spain
* Corresponding Author: Vedika Gupta. Email:
(This article belongs to this Special Issue: Emerging Applications of Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning and Data Science)

Computers, Materials & Continua 2022, 70(1), 213-231. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2022.016424

Received 02 January 2021; Accepted 24 April 2021; Issue published 07 September 2021

Abstract

COVID-19 has become one of the critical health issues globally, which surfaced first in latter part of the year 2019. It is the topmost concern for many nations’ governments as the contagious virus started mushrooming over adjacent regions of infected areas. In 1980, a vaccine called Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) was introduced for preventing tuberculosis and lung cancer. Countries that have made the BCG vaccine mandatory have witnessed a lesser COVID-19 fatality rate than the countries that have not made it compulsory. This paper’s initial research shows that the countries with a long-term compulsory BCG vaccination system are less affected by COVID-19 than those without a BCG vaccination system. This paper discusses analytical data patterns for medical applications regarding COVID-19 impact on countries with mandatory BCG status on fatality rates. The paper has tackled numerous analytical challenges to realize the full potential of heterogeneous data. An analogy is drawn to demonstrate how other factors can affect fatality and infection rates other than BCG vaccination only, such as age groups affected, other diseases, and stringency index. The data of Spain, Portugal, and Germany have been taken for a case study of BCG impact analysis.

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Keywords

Bacillus Calmette-Guérin; COVID-19; fatality rate; lockdown; gross domestic product; vaccine

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