How Open‑Source AI Is Powering the Global Fight Against COVID‑19

Open‑Source Efforts for COVID‑19 and Global Public Health

Today, Tencent’s engineers have adopted a new "solution" by joining the Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH) program, a global public‑health initiative launched by the Linux Foundation together with major members such as IBM and Cisco. Tencent is the only founding Chinese member.

The LFPH plan gathers leading technology and consulting firms, public‑health departments, epidemiologists, privacy and security experts, and individual developers to collaborate on open‑source code for epidemic response. Projects like Canada’s COVID Shield and Ireland’s COVID Green have already been open‑sourced through LFPH.

Early in the pandemic, Tencent engineers began contributing code to fight the outbreak. They open‑sourced the international version of the Tencent Health COVID‑19 module, enabling developers and service providers worldwide to quickly build pandemic‑information services.

GitHub repository: https://github.com/Tencent/TH_COVID19_International

They also released an AI self‑triage assistant that translates professional medical guidelines into simple conversational interactions, helping the public assess infection risk and receive preventive guidance. This tool has supported 40 disease‑control departments across 17 Chinese provinces, over 300 hospitals, and more than 30 industry partners, serving tens of millions of users.

The AI self‑triage code is available at https://github.com/Tencent/TH_COVID19_International/tree/master/src/servers/COVID-19-self-triage .

In collaboration with Professor Zhong Nanshan’s team, Tencent’s AI Lab developed a model that predicts the probability of COVID‑19 patients becoming critically ill within 5, 10, and 30 days, improving accuracy and stability over traditional methods. The model’s code is open‑sourced on GitHub.

GitHub repository for the severe‑case prediction model: https://github.com/cojocchen/covid19_critically_ill

Overall, Tencent has published over a hundred open‑source projects on GitHub, earning more than 300,000 stars, and holds top‑level membership in nine major open‑source foundations, demonstrating its influence in the global open‑source community.

Contributors are invited to join Tencent’s open‑source pandemic‑response projects and help combat the disease with code.