Evolution of automated learning techniques for combating COVID-19: an analysis

It is now more than two years that the world is battling the tiny invisible virus, COVID-19. Since its appearance, it showered humankind with shock, fear, and death. In small words, this pandemic has paused human life in all its aspects and beauties. Governments, health industry researchers and laboratories have put all their efforts to achieve a universal goal that is, overcoming the crisis and putting an end to the pandemic. However, this goal was never achievable without the smart use of automated learning, artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning algorithms. This review paper presents a collection of the experimental research articles tackled using real-time official datasets from hospitals and governments. These datasets are processed using automated learning (AL) algorithms in order to find suitable solutions to most of the COVID-19 related problems. This paper presents the AL applications in a story telling manner, starting from the first phases of COVID-19, when doctors had no experience dealing with the disease and had difficulty in diagnosing it, then moving to the other phases like suggesting a medicine, drug repurposing, facial mask detection, fake news detection, vaccine development, pandemic management, post vaccine statistics and lastly post COVID-19 analysis.