A survey on artificial intelligence approaches in supporting frontline workers and decision makers for the COVID-19 pandemic

•The current crisis related to the spread of COVID-19 has challenged epidemiologists and public health experts alike, leading to a rapid search for, and development of, new and innovative solutions to combat its spread.•A multidisciplinary approach needs to be followed for diagnosis, treatment and tracking, especially between medical and computer sciences, so, a common ground is available to facilitate the research work at a faster pace.•This review paper covers both medical and technological perspectives to facilitate the virologists, AI researchers and policymakers while in combating the COVID-19 outbreak.•This paper aimed to explore and understand how and which different technological tools and techniques have been used within the context of COVID-19.•Investigating artificial intelligence (AI) approaches for the diagnosis, anticipate infection and mortality rate by tracing contacts and targeted drug designing.•The impact of different kinds of medical data used in diagnosis, prognosis and pandemic analysis is also provided.•The investigation of this paper reveals several AI-based approaches that have been proposed as potential ways to help, with the COVID-19 pandemic, covering everything from initial diagnoses via image diagnostics up to the presentation of models that help to understand the spread of COVID-19 and identify potential new outbreak areas. While the world has experience with many different types of infectious diseases, the current crisis related to the spread of COVID-19 has challenged epidemiologists and public health experts alike, leading to a rapid search for, and development of, new and innovative solutions to combat its spread. The transmission of this virus has infected more than 18.92 million people as of August 6, 2020, with over half a million deaths across the globe; the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared this a global pandemic. A multidisciplinary approach needs to be followed for diagnosis, treatment and tracking, especially between medical and computer sciences, so, a common ground is available to facilitate the research work at a faster pace. With this in mind, this survey paper aimed to explore and understand how and which different technological tools and techniques have been used within the context of COVID-19. The primary contribution of this paper is in its collation of the current state-of-the-art technological approaches applied to the context of COVID-19, and doing this in a holistic way, covering multiple di