Facebook just rolled out an interactive map showing how many people have reported symptoms of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in counties across the United States. The map helps to determine the extent of the coronavirus pandemic in the country, providing insight into the areas needing more resources and which parts can be reopened.
The maps, which will be updated daily, are intended to help health officials to manage the pandemic better. The data will serve as a basis for budget and resource allocation. This way, those counties needing more help will be prioritized.
In partnership with Carnegie Mellon University Delphi Research Center, Facebook released the map to help health researchers identify COVID-19 hotspots early. Upon its release, the map now has more than a million people responding to the survey within the first two weeks. There are an estimated two billion Facebook users across the globe.
Survey on self-reported symptoms
The survey from the CMU Delphi Research Center asks users to self-report symptoms tied to COVID-19 or the flu. The common signs and symptoms of the novel coronavirus infection include fever, dry cough, sore throat, and difficulty of breathing. In the past, surveys like this have helped scientists successfully forecast the spread of illnesses, such as the flu.
Further, the survey will help project how many cases hospitals and health officials will see in the days ahead, providing an early indicator of where the pandemic is growing, and which places are flattening the curve.
“Getting accurate county-by-county data from across the U.S. is challenging, and obtaining such focused data from across the whole world is even harder. But with a community of billions of people globally, Facebook can uniquely help researchers and health authorities get the information they need to respond to the outbreak and start planning for the recovery,” Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Facebook, said in a statement.
How the map works
The research team at Carnegie Mellon released the initial findings, showing promising results. The data can help predict where the disease will spread.
The interactive map shows a county-by-county breakdown of how many Facebook users have reported symptoms of COVID-19. The researchers can also compare to those who reported flu-like symptoms. Further, it is capable of sorting data by hospital referral regions (HRRs), indicating which hospitals may have the most cases and the most onerous burden. HRRs represent regional health care providers with at least one hospital for specialized medical care.
The data gathered from the social media users can become valuable for policymakers and government officials to forecast potential outbreaks of COVID-19. Though the estimates do not represent confirmed COVID-19 cases, they should not be used for diagnostic or treatment purposes.
Since many individuals are hooked to social media, such as Facebook, it is vital to use this platform to reach to more people amid the coronavirus pandemic. Knowing the fraction of people with potential infection due to their symptoms is essential to properly impose restrictions and social distancing measures. Also, it provides an early warning on which areas should prepare for the virus spread.
“Facebook is uniquely suited to run these surveys because we serve a global community of billions of people and can do statistically accurate sampling. We do this in a privacy-protective way where only the researchers at Carnegie Mellon see individual survey responses -- and Facebook only sees aggregated data,” Zuckerberg explained.
“The next step is to start running these surveys globally this week. This will allow us to expand the symptom maps to provide county-by-county data across almost every country in the world where Facebook operates,” he added. It is important to conduct surveys in other countries to provide more detailed work and see which countries across the globe at a high risk of health system breakdown.
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