How Many Coronavirus Cases Are Happening In Schools? This Tracker Keeps Count

Volunteers from tech companies collaborated with epidemiologists to create a Covid-19 tracking site that works to monitor the spread of the virus and help people know if they have been in contact with anyone who may have been infected. Although registration to the site is still short of the goal number, 10,000 people have already provided their information.

To help with the coronavirus vaccine distribution, a New York-based start-up has introduced a service that connects "vaccine providers who find themselves with extra vaccines to people who are willing to get one at a moment’s notice." Although the project is still being piloted, more than 500,000 vaccination-seekers and 200 vaccine providers have signed up for the initiative, and some health officials believe it could become a model for a more equitable distribution strategy.

The San Antonio Independent School District developed an app to help combat the Covid-slide among its students, including English Language Learning students. The app tracks interactions, class attendance, and completed assignments, but also correspondence and in-person interactions. Administrators took the data collected on its close to 50,000 students and developed strategies to direct special attention or make contact with students with decreased engagement. Out of 48,000 students, only 142 didn't have a contact log.

The uncertainty surrounding COVID-19 and the health impacts it may have for different people prompted doctors from across the U.S. to create a national patient database to better study and understand how the virus interacts with other underlying conditions. Although the database itself is adaptable and researchers hope it can also be used in the face of future pandemics, they also say "five years from now, the greatest value of this data set won’t be the data. It’ll have been the methods that we learned trying to get it working."

South Korea has effectively crushed the curve in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic by using extensive tracking and tracing on its citizens. Using a combination of GPS tracking, monitoring CCTV footage, and even checking bank accounts to see where people visited, the government released that information publicly to track those who tested positive and warn those who might be at risk. Acknowledged as an invasion of privacy, it has also kept the country out of lockdown.

South Korea and Hong Kong have been able to contain the coronavirus without imposing restrictive lockdowns by implementing an aggressive and widespread testing, data sharing and contact tracing regime. In the case of South Korea, the country was able to not just flatten the curve of coronavirus cases in only 20 days, but also maintain a decrease in cases even after a parliamentary election with record-setting turnout numbers.

The COVID Tracking Project is a grassroots, crowdsourced, publicly-accessible tool that provides more detailed and updated information about the state of the Coronavirus than the CDC does. It is the only source on COVID-19 that relies on humans to collect and make sense of data. The project now includes about sixty-five volunteers and aims to put pressure on the decision-makers responsible for testing and containment.

Taiwan has gone largely unscathed thus far by the coronavirus, showing that their methodology of relying on civic technology has merit to be a model for other countries. Through a combination of "community initiatives, hackathons, and digital deliberation" Taiwan has been able to utilize "broad digital participation and community-driven tool development," both democratically and efficiently.

As word of the coronavirus outbreak spread, so did misinformation, so the World Health Organization began working with big tech companies to put a stop to it. Collaborating with the likes of Pinterest, Google, Twitter, and Facebook, W.H.O. has posted content that disputes the incorrect information across platforms and sites in order to make "falsehoods harder to find in searches or on news streams."

Launched in September 2017, Cognoma is a database of information regarding the genetic makeup of cancerous tumors developed in collaboration between University of Pennsylvania researchers and Philadelphia’s tech community. Looking for a way to help their community and convinced of the value of the project, people donated their time and coding talents and built the database piece by piece. The database—as well as the programming behind it—are publicly available for researchers to utilize and adapt to other ends.