this is bbc news. the headlines: the italian prime minister has announced radical new restrictions in an effort to contain the spread of coronavirus in his country. the measures include limiting orbit emergency travel in and out of the worst affected region, lombardi, and 11 other provinces in the north and east of the country. rescue efforts are continuing in china's eastern city of quanzhou, after a five story hotel collapsed, killing four people and injuring dozens more. the building had been used as a quarantine facility for people who had come into contact with confirmed cases of coronavirus. 3500 people aboard the grand princess cruise ship off the coast of san francisco are being tested for coronavirus. 21 passengers and are being tested for coronavirus. 2i passengers and crew earlier tested positive for the disease. the authorities will bring the ship to a non—commercial port and pointing people there. that quarantine people there.

now on bbc news, it is time for click. this week, the truth about the truth about coronavirus. can ai help to treat it? can it predict its spread? could quantum computers find a cure? also, self—driving wheelchair departing now from terminal seven. ifeel like the queen. hello. this week marks three months since the world first heard about a newly identified disease.

i am of of course talking about covid—i9, which is caused by a new type of coronavirus. to date there have been over 3000 deaths from nearly 100,000 confirmed cases in 81 countries. and this is how i know that. this is thejohn hopkins university covid—i9 dashboard. since it went live injanuary, it has gone viral and in a good way by demystifying the stats and the numbers behind the spread of this disease. it is amalgamating data from many of the world's health agencies and so for example right now i can see the total number of confirmed cases is just over 93,000, these are the countries where they have confirmed cases and, just as importantly i think, this is the total number of people who have already recovered completely from the disease. and this is just one of the pop—up projects that have appeared online, aiming to demystify the glut of covid—i9 data. community power site next strain drops the genome data shared by scientists around the world.

as covid—i9 is transmitted from person to person, it can change its genetic makeup in subtle ways, allowing researchers to build a family tree. to see how the disease has spread and it's genuinely fascinating stuff. because in a crisis, particularly one that is growing rapidly like the coronavirus outbreak, we really need to communicate with people about what they can do individually and collectively to try and help get this under control. but also it is important that individuals understand that if they make minor relatively mundane changes to their behaviour, they can help us to slow the spread of this down. in 2018, the bbc ran its own experiments to simulate the spread of a flu—like disease using a network of virtually infected smartphones.

for me, the show did a brilliantjob of revealing how simple things like washing our hands can make a massive difference to how quickly and how far a disease spreads. 0n the right is what happens if we all wash our hands really well. 0n the left, is what happens if we do not. just look at how the spread is slowed if we follow the advice of washing our hands well and often. posts like this are everywhere on social media, recommending good handwashing techniques and other scientifically grounded tips to try and limit the spread of germs. but they are not the only things you might find if you look online for coronavirus information. over the past few months, social media companies have been waging their own war against a different kind of pathogen. dubbed an ‘infodemic‘ by the world health organisation, social networks have been deluged with information about the coronavirus.

some of this is correct, and helpful, but a lot of it is misleading, half true or completely fake. and that is making the real information and advice much harder to find. looking through tiktok now, and it looks like any search for coronavirus or similar term now brings up this banner at the top and these videos from well—known organisations at the top spots. similarly, dubious recommendations seem to have gone, coronavirus conspiracies used be one of the suggestions search tags. not any more. on facebook, it is a similar story with posts from well—known and trusted organisations taking up the top spots. so some of the kinds of misinformation that does travel around would be first of all not believing that there is a problem at all. and that this is a creation in order to try and control people. that has been seen before.

and is being seen now. also, people come up with ideas of cures, whether it is drinking garlic water or whatever that suggest something will happen or that there is a cure out there that it is being withheld. that is the circulating rumour at the moment. and you have to counter that because if you do not, people will not take action in the way that you want them to. so it is really important that we get the true messaging out there and the science underpinning it and that is what we are trying to do. and if you're really interested in educating yourself on the science behind covid—i9, professor ward has a free online course that should really protect you from the fake facts. so, that is where we are now. but, in this emerging age of artificial intelligence, we are starting to get glimpses of how that technology may help us in fighting outbreaks like this. and lara has been investigating.

this coronavirus seems to have shaken up life as we know it. inevitably, it is going to continue to spread. but how far and fast that is going to happen and what we are going to do about it are still in question. so could artificial intelligence play a vital part in providing some answers and maybe even improving the outcome? ai had an important role in the initial understanding of this outbreak. canadian specialists blue dot deals with global epidemic intelligence and identified very early on that something was amiss through a combination of medical and airline data. we were one of the first groups in the world that identified this outbreak.

this was back actually on new year's eve day, the morning of december 31, the machine learning algorithms that we developed had picked up information in chinese of a pneumonia, it wasn't known to be a coronavirus, of unknown cause, centred around this market in wuhan. when it was presented to our team, we recognised there were parallels to the sars outbreak 17 years earlier so we knew immediately that there were some historic parallels here and that this outbreak really warranted our attention. and this is where the human scientists were needed. ai can alert but cannot yet do the investigations to say what is really occurring. detecting an outbreak is really just the first step. there are multiple other things that need to happen. ultimately, we need to determine what kinds of risk does this pose, is it likely to spread?

if it is going to spread, where might it go? what kind of consequences might occur from that spread? and ultimately, we have to get that information into the hands of people who can then be empowered with the information to take the appropriate actions. it is notjust about tracking, though. the dream is that one day, ai might be able to conjure up necessary vaccines on the spot. 0r repurpose drugs to deal with new challenges. the latter being something benevolent ai in london is already leading the way on. this company uses al to better understand the mechanism of disease. correlating data on illnesses, drugs and outcomes and providing more information than any human being could ever come up with. and in this case, a potential lead. what are we looking at here? this is a demonstration of our algorithm processing documents in real time, reading the abstracts of scientific publications related to coronavirus and extracting relationships between key biological concepts that we really care about to carry out drug discovery.

and at this point, we're just a few months into an outbreak that could really, really grow. how meaningful do you think this data is so far? there's a huge amount of information being published. we are notjust pulling out the coronavirus information. but we are merging it with a lot of existing publications on underlying biology. 0ur algorithms reads over biology at multiple layers from the nano world of proteins interacting on ourselves, through this maze of biological processes, up to a human defined definitions of diseases. it is very early days for the process but it is suggesting what might be worth further investigation. now, a lot of people are looking at virals, antivirals and how they might potentially treat the disease. we looked at it from a completely different way. we said, what are the other types of approved drugs that might inhibit

the progression of that disease in the body? so, we surfaced a number of drugs and then we did some experimentation based on that, and further research. and we came up with this one drug that we think is best suited. it has both anti—inflammatory properties as well as the ability to stop what is called endocytosis, which is what enables the virus to enter the lungs, which is the most potentially dangerous outcome of the coronavirus. the company stresses that this is only conjecture. and although the drug in question is approved for use in rheumatoid arthritis, clinical trials and full scientific evidence would be needed before it could even come close to being used for this purpose. what we are trying to do is use this technology in the service of science to further the development of novel treatments for diseases that currently have no treatment. like, right now in the world there is over 9000 diseases that have no treatment. ai will play a greater

role than it has already because what is being done is genetic sequences are being taken and that is the understanding of the organism itself and this is putting in a database that can then determine where a virus came from and what it might be going in the future. of course ai has not solved the covid—i9 crisis. but it has hopefully help to some extent and should be learning from it to be even more helpful in any future disease outbreaks. hello and welcome to the week in tech. it was the week hong kong airline cathay pacific was fined £500,000 by the uk's information commissioner's office for failing to protect customers' personal data. the bafta games award nominations were announced, with death stranding and control leading the pack with 11 nominations each. winners will be revealed

on the 2nd of april. and tesla admitted that it has put older, slower processors in some of its new cars because of supply issues related to the coronavirus. the company said it would upgrade the hardware when supplies improve. if the thought of the smart robots fills you with worry, or even fear, you might want to look away now. these bots have learned to walk in, scarily, just a matter of hours. google robotics used al to help mechanical monstrosities master the art of walking forwards, backwards and even turning. if that doesn't concerns you, boston dynamics, the company that brought us cyborg canines, have unveiled what happens when robots work together. this strange—looking pair have partnered up for a shift to demonstrate the future of warehouse automation, showing off absolute,

unbridled and organised efficiency. but maybe for now, let's just keep them stacking boxes. this extending phone concept can transform from a smartphone into a 7.8—inch tablet. it is one of several prototypes revealed by chinese phone maker tcl. instead of a folding display, this concept has a screen that rolls up inside the phone and that way, there supposedly will not be a crease on the screen. the one i saw was just a dummy model with no electronics inside, but the company says it is working on the real thing. there will be huge challenges to making this practical. for starters, it will have to work out how to stop dirt getting into the mechanism and scratching the screen, although the design is eye—catching. here's another concept — a tablet that can be folded in half. when it is closed, it looks

a bit like a tiny laptop, which i thought was very cute. and out of all the concepts tcl showed me, i thought this was the most robust and practical. and finally, a trifold tablet — essentially a ten—inch tablet that folds down into a very chunky phone. it has two hinges — one folds forwards and one folds backwards — and you can bend it into a lot of unusual shapes, although i'm not entirely sure why you would want to. n0w, none of these are ready to go on sale and the company doesn't even know how much they would cost, but it does give us an idea of what some phones might look like in the future. if computers are, in the future, going to help us design vaccines to take on threats like covid—i9, well, those computers are probably going to need to be very different. and they're also going to look very different. this is a quantum computer. in this case, one of google's.

and while it is still early days, one of the things people expect quantum processors will eventually be very good at is solving hugely complex medical problems. a lot of calculations we run today with chemistry, you have to make approximations very early on in the calculation, which means you decrease the accuracy of the results. with quantum computing, we are hoping that someday, we're gonna be able to get high accuracy in a low amount of time. quantum computers have some peculiar properties. they can consider many solutions to a problem at the same time. once we truly understand how to build them at scale and operate them, these machines should massively outperform traditional computers at certain tasks. and there is a feeling that we are starting to get close to this quantum dream. at ces earlier this year, ibm, one of google's main quantum competitors, was showing

off its 0 system 0ne. it is one of the most beautiful things i've ever seen. maybe that is because i am a massive geek, but can you give me a tour of the bits? yeah, sure. what you see on the outside is a refrigerator, so it is put there to keep everything nice and cold. the quantum chip sits at the very bottom of the quantum computer — you can see where all of those — yeah. that exposure in the centre? the little square? yes. on that square, we have about 20 qubits on this particular device. 0k. those are all interconnected. and when this is in operation, it is the coldest thing in the universe. it is 100 times colder than outer space at the very bottom of the quantum computer. wow. how do you interact with this? yeah. how do the instructions come in and how do those the results come out?

yeah, so microwave pulses is what you send in, and it changes the cubits‘ phase and that is how we essentially programme a quantum computer. we can run them from your laptop. is there a usb port somewhere? laughter. you just plug it in. yeah—no, we access these over the cloud. the kind of computer programme you might write for a quantum computer is nothing like the kind of code you would write for a normal computer, is it? no, it looks totally different. some of the concepts are kinda of similar, like how you have different gates and things like that. but you're not programming in ones and zeros anymore. in fact, when you actually lay it out, it looks much more like a musical composition. so you have lines of qubits in these different gates that interact and it looks like a piece of music. wow! yeah. the more qubits, the more complex a calculation the computer can theoretically make. and at the end of last year, google said that, for the first time, there was one calculation that its quantum computer could do

way quicker then a non—quantum machine. which meant that it had reached something called quantum supremacy. but it is something that ibm says is a red herring. they showed something very specific. it was a nice experiment. i think that there is much more work to be done. it was a very specific example. i think that there is a lot of work to be done to be able to broaden that out and show a little bit more applicability. so i actually like to think of it as quantum advantage. quantum advantage is kind of that point in time where you are doing a calculation on a quantum computer that you couldn't be able to do on a classical computer. so, we were discussing chemistry, for example. it would be when we are able to achieve a higher level of accuracy for a molecule that we cannot do today

using a classical computer, or that is too time intensive to be able to achieve that. both ibm and google believe that we are on the cusp of something big with quantum computing. ibm talks about the 2020s being ‘the quantum decade'. so maybe for the next pandemic, we will have bigger weapons in our arsenal. the mind—bending world of the quantum computer! now, we often talk about autonomous cars on this programme but have you ever heard of an autonomous wheelchair? the concept has actually been around for a few years now but issues around reliability have meant the idea has never really made any progress. but one japanese company says it has a solution, and paul carter's been to new york's jfk airport to sit in on a very special live trial. it's safe to say that airports and disabled people haven't always been the best of friends. if you have mobility needs, most airports and airlines require

you to book assistance in advance, which usually means being manually pushed by staff to a predetermined point within the terminal, resulting in a loss of autonomy and independence. but this mightjust have the potential to change all of that. this is the whill autonomous wheelchair. at first glance, it looks pretty much like a normal power chair but thanks to some very clever technology built into the front here, this has the potential at least to transport passengers from security all the way over there, perhaps via duty—free, all the way to one of the gates, like the one behind me. it has two wide—angle cameras on the front, cameras on the back, as well as lidar and infrared sensors. they combine to make sure the chair doesn't collide with anything. prior to the chair being let loose on passengers, it has to spend several days plotting routes around the terminal building — in this case, jfk's terminal seven — all the time building up an internal

map which it uses to locate itself. i arrived to see the start of a two—day live trial. the process starts from the site survey, so we understand the airport environment, for example, how do customers line up for boarding, how crowded the terminal is going to be, and what is the peak hour and non—peak hour? and eventually, we have to talk with operationals — how do we actually bring this and integrate this together with the existing wheelchair service? now, the concept of self—driving wheelchairs isn't necessarily new. but whill‘s autonomous chair is the first to be trialled in a live airport environment. of course, it only gets you from security around the terminal and doesn't solve the problem of getting on and off the planes themselves. this trial is a partnership with british airways, who are looking to see if the technology can be used to improve the experiences

of disabled passengers. now, of course, i couldn't resist taking it for a spin around jfk myself. literally just press go? literallyjust press go? yes. now, taking this down towards gate three. now, if i'm being critical, the ride could have been smoother. the chair has to stop often when it senses obstacles, such as people — and in a busy airport likejfk, there are obviously lots of those. i already feel quite safe. i don't feel like i'm going to run anybody down. ifeel like the queen. hello! after i had my few minutes of fun, it was time to let the more important people — actual passengers — try it for the first time. however, it didn't completely go to plan. call it the click curse, but despite the many dozens of successful tests with its first passenger, the chair seemed to think it was in a different place

causing it to get confused, and staff eventually had to take over. subsequent passengers did try the chair and it did work well. they just didn't just want to be filmed, so you have to take my word for it. despite the unsuccessful ride, hansa was still positive about the potential technology. wonderful. would you use it again? i would, anytime! being independent, there's nothing that you have to wait for somebody. you just go when you feel like to go. maybe because i'm getting to that age, so i need it! the next stage for the wheelchair is a full—scale trial at london's heathrow, planned for march, which will pose its own set of challenges. if it's a success, we could see these rolled out across airports where ba operates. air travellers needing assistance will be watching with interest. that is it for this week. don't forget, we live on social media, so if you need us, you know where to find us —

facebook, youtube, instagram, and twitter at bbcclick. thanks for watching. we will see you soon. hello. saturday brought contrasting weather fortunes across the british isles, the south and east. dry for the most part. further north and west, it turned out to be a pretty wet and windy sort of day — notjust on the ayrshire coast either. much of that brought about by this weather front which, through sunday, takes relatively mild air over towards the continent, leaves us with something slightly fresher. the isobars begin to open up a touch but there's still a fairfew of them, so it's a brighter day, yes, but there will be a scattering of showers. no great organisation about them, i suspect. the heaviest of them perhaps out towards the west, and a few more of them as well. but the temperatures just

falling back a degree or two from the lofty heights of saturday. and we get into a showery regime to finish off the week but the monday and the tuesday look to be mild and wet and windy. and for all of that, you have to look quite a way out into the atlantic, but with time, so that system works its way towards the western side of the british isles. monday starts off dry enough. don't be fooled. northern ireland, you cloud up in the morning and here comes that wind and rain, and then that pushes into the west of scotland, widely across the west of england, through wales. some really quite heavy rain in there. and it's driest for longest yet again further towards the east, both in the north—east of scotland and the eastern side of england. you get to see the wind and rain there later on in the day on monday. and then just when you hope that that frontal system will move away, itjust kinks a wee bit there, so we keep the cloud and the rain for the greater part of england and wales. for scotland, northern ireland, something a little bit brighter, but there are plenty of showers to be had

across the north and west of scotland on what is going to be a blustery day right across the piste. but that front really makes a difference because across central and southern areas — look at this — 15, 16, possibly 17 degrees! it's not overly cold further north, but you're closer to 8 to about 12 degrees or so because the air is coming in from just south of west and we keep it coming from that sort of direction through wednesday. but the weather front will have moved away, taking the very mildest of the air with it. brighter skies, therefore, for many of us on wednesday but still with a packet of showers across many northern and western areas. much drier, brighter prospect, though, further east, but notjust as mild as was the case perhaps for some of you during the course of tuesday. the second half of the week, as i say, the temperatures just begin to dribble away. no more the 17, but not bad for the time of year.

welcome to bbc news. i'm james reynolds. our top stories: italy's prime minister announces new measures to try to tackle the outbreak of coronavirus. up to 60 million people could have the freedom of movement restricted. a building used as a quarantine centre for the virus collapses in china, fourare centre for the virus collapses in china, four are confirmed dead will stop all passengers stuck on board a huge cruise ship stranded on the california coast are being tested for the virus. protests, celebrations. calls for action. people around the world mark international women's day.