I’m now writing up my Masters thesis project in parallel with technically optimising the research platform I’ve built. To spur me on through what seems like a trial of endurance, I thought I’d share some brief takeaways as I complete each chapter. First up, the introduction.

• I learned the phrase coronavirus was first coined by a Scottish woman, June Almeida, in 1966, when she discovered a group of viruses looked like a solar corona under an electron microscope.

• As of February 2021, the nunber of U.S. deaths from COVID-19 has surpassed 500,000, more than the death toll from WWI, WWII, and the Vietnam war combined. A really depressing statistic.

• One figure states over 3000 related, peer-reviewed new COVID-19 related papers are published daily (Lee et al., 2019), while another indicates the doubling of papers every 20 days, among the biggest explosions of scientific literature (Brainard, 2020). That’s a real issue for researchers finding relevant information. However, it’s an exciting challenge for me to architect a solution capable of searching this vast unstructured knowledge with low latency.

I really fear there’s going to be a huge mental health fallout from the pandemic.