Could Quantum Help Beat the Next Coronovirus?

(USAToday) Quantum computing isn’t yet far enough along that it could have helped curb the spread of this coronavirus outbreak. But this emerging field of computing will almost certainly help scientists and researchers confront future crises.
USA Today interviewed Dario Gil, the director of IBM Research and posed the question and he responded thus, “Can we compress the rate at which we discover, for example, a treatment or an approach to this? The goal is to do everything that we are doing today in terms of discovery of materials, chemistry, things like that, (in) factors of 10 times better, 100 times better.”
Gil says quantum computing today is in roughly the same spot where artificial intelligence was in 2010. His IBM colleague Dr. Robert Sutor says, “Just to be clear, nobody on the planet has a quantum computer that can today do better that our classical computers.”
But IBM says it can double the power of a quantum computer every year, and at some point cross a threshold at which the quantum machines might leap past classical computers, at least to address certain types of problems.
NOTE: USA Today toured IBM’s quantum lab in Yorktown Heights, New York for this interview. The author Edward Baig provides an extensive explanation about quantum computing that is aimed at the readership of the publication that is worth sharing with friends and colleagues who are not in the quantum technology realm to explain this emerging arena.