BlueDot Global has long used GDELT to track global news coverage of disease outbreaks across the world, feeding GDELT's results into their own powerful machine learning systems that sift through the results and coupling that automated filtering with review by human medical experts to assess each result.
It turns out that BlueDot's system actually sent one of the first alerts about the coronavirus, issuing an alert on December 31st, 2019, nearly a week before the US CDC's official announcement on January 6, 2020 and the WHO's announcement on January 9th.
BlueDot's alert has received considerable attention in the press over the past week, detailing more about its global epidemiological monitoring system!