INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Many, many symptom trackers have launched during the coronavirus pandemic, but few have the potential to reach even a bucketful of Facebook
vast ocean of users.
Facebook launched a symptom tracking partnership with Carnegie Mellon University Delphi epidemiological research center
early this month, and now the company plans to expand the project outside of the United States In early April, Facebook began prompting
some users in the United States with a CMU survey asking them to self-report COVID-19 symptoms
The effort is designed to help governments and health officials predict where the virus could hit next.
Facebook will work with researchers
from the University of Maryland on the expansion as the team at CMU Delphi develops an API that would allow any researcher to tap into the
data set.
Facebook is also collecting survey data onto its own symptom map, which visualizes the percentage of the population with COVID-19
symptoms by county and hospital referral region
The map also displays flu activity distinct from reported COVID-19 symptoms
With testing capacity still limited in many places, this kind of survey effort seeks to provide a more anticipatory picture of the virus and
where it might be spreading next.
The real-time estimates we&ve derived correlate with the best available data on COVID-19 activity, which
gives us confidence that we may soon be able to give health care officials forecasts of disease activity that is likely to occur in their
localities several weeks into the future,& Ryan Tibshirani, co-lead on Carnegie Mellon University Delphi COVID-19 Response Team, said in a
statement.
The opt-in CMU survey asks Facebook users if they were experiencing coughing, fever, shortness of breath or loss of smell —
symptoms that can show up in COVID-19 patients in more mild forms and that likely would be present prior to an individual seeking treatment
and thus being tracked by healthcare systems.
Facebook starts prompting US users to fill out a COVID-19 survey to help track the virus
CMU
published its initial findings on Monday, which show the data collected on Facebook correlates with existing COVID-19 public health data
The research team is introducing a tool called COVIDcast, which collects aggregated data about COVID-19 activity, sorted by geographic area
Google has also joined CMU research effort and later this week the COVIDcast will integrate data from both Facebook and Google survey
So far, the project has collected nearly one million responses each week on Facebook and 600,000 through Google Opinion Rewards and AdMob
apps.
In an op-ed in The Washington Post, Mark Zuckerberg touted his company efforts.
Getting accurate county-by-county data from across the
United States is challenging, and obtaining such focused data from across the whole world is even harder,& Zuckerberg wrote, adding that
Facebook is &uniquely& suited to aid research efforts that require surveying large subsets of the population.
The pandemic is already
reshaping tech misinformation crisis
After a long season of criticism, social media companies are striving for relevance in the fight
Facebook, particularly dogged by negative press and privacy scandals in recent years, was early to add UI elements promoting COVID-19
information from health experts on its platform
Still, Facebook and other social networks remain plagued by coronavirus misinformation, scammers and conspiracies, which spread quickly and
have proven difficult for companies to stamp out.
Last week, a handful of United States anti-government protests organized on Facebook and
promoted by President Trump defied the advice of state governments and public health officials, calling users to gather in public — an act
of defiance that could potentially spread the virus to new communities in spite of the best efforts by state governments to protect their
