Governments and authorities knew little about the virus since the emergency of COVID-19 outbreak. The Chinese government upon the discovery of the early patients in Wuhan, informed WHO on 31 December 2019, as pneumonia of unknown causes. Epidemiologists, data scientists and biostatisticians have been working hand-in-hand for a common mission of trying to characterize and understand the characteristics of the infection as well as the virus itself, which is SARS alike. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.