Students on lockdown create a global guide to coronavirus conspiracy theories, fake cures, and other whopping lies

Accredited social health activists (ASHA) across India fight COVID-19 related misinformation on WhatsApp. ASHAs provide basic health care to people in their villages, which puts them on the frontline of treating COVID-19 patients and educating people to dispel the many myths about the virus and its treatments. ASHAs' local interactions often identify prevailing myths, which they quickly dispel in their face-to-face exchanges and by posting in the many local WhatsApp groups that have been created. The local groups have been an effective mode of educating people and helped ASHAs gain villagers’ trust.

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.

To better trace the spread of coronavirus, Singapore and China have been using apps that collect data about citizens' whereabouts and let people know if they've potentially been in contact with someone who has been diagnosed with the virus. Now, similar apps are being piloted in New York and Massachusettes in an attempt to better "understand more about the clinical course of the disease."

Facebook collects data from people that choose to share their location with the app, and have started sharing it with various researchers who are trying to track the spread of the novel coronavirus. They share the data anonymously, so as to avoid the privacy issues they’ve faced in the past, and researchers aggregate “the signals into a picture of flows of people” to track connectivity and movement. Beyond researchers, nonprofits are also using it to help disseminate medical resources to highly affected areas.

Weeks before the coronavirus outbreak was declared to be a pandemic, Seoul, and other parts of South Korea set into motion a combination of "prevention and mitigation programs" that are now being touted as lessons for other countries struggling to contain the virus. Using technological advancements such as a national mobile phone alert system and mobile phone applications along with increased transparency around data collected, new reports of cases have slowed allowing the country to prepare for a potential surge later on.

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."

Despite never mandating a lockdown, South Korea has been able to better control the spread of COVID-19 as compared to other countries of similar economic and development status. Focusing on information management and testing, as well as the use of technology to aid both of these tactics, the country has kept the case count to fewer than 80 cases per day. According to the chairman of the World Health Organization’s global outbreak alert and response network, “No country has adapted to living with, and containing, the virus like South Korea."

Women in GIS Kenya created a digital tool that helps the government track the number of Covid-19 cases, recoveries, and confirmed deaths, as well as the number of tests administered. The online database combines a survey that assesses a person's symptoms with cellphone GPS data to create a map of current hot spots and recommend treatment locations. The government credits the tool, which can also predict high-risk areas vulnerable to future outbreaks, with helping to keep Kenya's COVID-19-related deaths relatively low compared to other countries. The tool is popular among younger, tech-savvy populations.

In South Korea, the government is using smartphone technology, including various independent apps and text messaging, to implement contact tracing. This has enabled the country's economy to avoid a full shutdown. Early results comparing South Korea to other countries shows that this digital strategy is just as successful as implementing complete lockdowns.

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.