I really want to call upon any engineers/managers at Apple/Google/Garmin/Fitbit: please start working on body temperature monitoring. It doesn't have to be a realtime readout like a heart monitor, but something that could work overnight to find an average. This could stop entire pandemics.
Really good question. One hypothesis is that they're massively under-testing, but there's not a lot of data to support that. If you look at https://covidtracking.com/data/ for example, you see a positivity ratio of about 9% for FL, compared with 86% (!!!) for NJ, where it is really clear that the situation is dire but we're not seeing it because of lack of testing.
The other one to watch is Michigan. There the "data quality grade" from covidtracking is a D.
I think Iceland pop 300,000 tested everyone. The result is 50% of the cases are asymptomatic. That's terrible in two ways, one is potentially it's spreading undetected. And two natural herd immunity comes at an enormous cost.
The usefulness instantly clicked when I saw this - awesome work, and I wish it were government promoted.
I'm no good at writing copy, but I'd work on the homepage's phrasing. Link to https://healthweather.us/ as well as the NYT article on them, rather than making a reference to Maddow elsewhere (it'd be dumb for someone to be turned away by that, but someone will be.) Explain that CDC data lags three weeks behind historically, and point out all the counties without data. Say all this on the front page, and run A/B tests once you have enough visitors.
May I ask how is any of the data you collect of any use if there is zero verification that said data is from actual people with symptoms?
I was just able to enter a US Zip code and normal temperature 98.6 without any verification. The site doesn't even check for location. I was able to enter data for a "US citizen" from Europe. Then clear cookies and do it again.
Verification of data is a huge thing if you want to make any kind of decision based on that data.
This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.
The second one has a sample size of less than thousand people and concludes "Self-diagnosis does not accurately predict influenza seropositivity"
The third one is the only one that has a good set of data in terms of sample size ( 50+ Million ) but concludes "Symptom checkers had deficits in both triage and diagnosis" and that said I have no idea if those websites need some kind of verification as well, so if not someone who's bored could have just added bogus data to that as well.
I'm curious about something: Is fever is a symptom that would appear without someone noticing it? Wouldn't other symptoms like chills/coughing manifest first?
People often don’t know they have a fever. Not necessarily because they feel well, but because they fail to identify their ill feeling as “fever”. I’ve had tons of patients deny fever, endorse fever symptoms, and then have a fever on thermometer.
Will this track individual's symptom progression over time? e.g. if I submit everyday as suggested, are these uncorrelated datapoints, or do you get trend info?
Yes, we get trend info. We're storing a cookie in your browser with a UUID that is associated to your temperature reading. If you submit temperatures for multiple people in your household, they all get that UUID, which we assume to be a household identifier.
Carson here, site developer. Thank you for the positive response so far, but also feel free to leave us constructive criticism. If you want to contribute to this effort, the GitHub is https://github.com/carsonbaker/takeyourtemp. We're working on it with frenetic energy.
Celsius would be good. It'd save me a manual conversion. And 98.6 is just a conversion from 37C anyway that ignored the rules of significant figures...
We might. There's some worry that e.g. showing a heat map of the data might be alarming, so we're trying to figure out where the balance is between transparency and cautiousness.
I had an idea, that one way to eliminate this COVID-19 coronavirus, as well as the H1N1 influenza virus from civilization, is to shut down all human movement for 30 to 60 days.
You have to go 2 or 3 weeks, without any new reported infections to be sure.
This would require that all the countries and governments of the world, act in unison, to ensure that all 7 billion people are tracked, and monitored.
But the reality is, good luck, as this will never happen. The economic cost is too high, but the alternative, is that the COVID-19 virus will hunt down the human race.