Facebook has partnered with Carnegie Mellon University to launch an interactive Covid-19 map that shows the estimated percentage of people exhibiting symptoms of the virus on a county-by-county basis.
The map uses aggregated public data from a survey conducted by Carnegie Mellon University Delphi Research Center. Worth reiterating is the fact that it only shows estimates for people with Covid-19 symptoms, not confirmed cases.
In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that initial findings shared by Carnegie Mellon correlate with public data about confirmed cases of COVID-19, an important signal that symptom surveys will soon be able to forecast the disease’s spread. Facebook will use aggregated data from the university to produce interactive maps based on symptom surveys and will update them daily.
“I’ve always believed that helping people come together as a community will help us address our greatest challenges not just by sharing our experiences and supporting each other in crises but also by working together at scale to solve problems,” Zuckerberg wrote. “The world has faced pandemics before, but this time we have a new superpower: the ability to gather and share data for good. If we use it responsibly, I’m optimistic that data can help the world respond to this health crisis and get us started on the road to recovery.”
Facebook also announced a partnership with the University of Maryland to begin collecting symptom data globally. If Facebook users report symptoms in their own countries at rates similar to their participation in the United States, the data could prove to be an effective map of potential hotspots around the globe, said Ryan Tibshirani, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon who is helping to lead the school’s partnership with Facebook.
Facebook is just one in a growing list of tech giants that are using their power and reach to track the virus. Apple and Google are co-developing a contact tracing system and Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger are monitoring the spread through a metric called Rt which measures the number of people who become infected by an infectious individual.
