Doctors team up to build a Covid-19 tracker to tackle community infection

Team Udayavani, Apr 21, 2020, 3:48 PM IST

Various scientists and health professionals across the world are developing live, interactive maps on user-friendly applications to help researchers, public health authorities as well as the general public in tracking Covid-19.

Now, a group of health care professionals have come up with a website named https://trackcovid-19.org/ which is a crowdsourced community-based illness tracker. The website crowdsources symptoms like Cough, fever and shortness of breath. It captures and maps individual data points on a map with the granularity of a PIN Code.

The website was developed by Dr Ajay Hegde, who trained in Manipal as a Neurosurgeon, along with software developers Abhilash Pradhan and Vinayak, under the guidance of Dr Ramesh Masthi, Public Health expert and actively involved in Bangalore’s contact tracing and quarantine team.

Dr Masthi says, as it is impossible to test each and every individual, the website aims to track Symptomatic individuals and direct testing in community hotspots.

The team layered 3 data sets on a Map: Healthy, Symptomatic(crowdsourced) and positive cases from government websites and media.

In the websites, users self-report the presence and absence of common symptoms associated with Covid-19 and exposure to a Covid-19 patient in addition to demographics which include age, sex and PIN Code and email address which is optional.

Also, the website is simple to use and takes less than 60 seconds to answer. The website does not collect any kind of personal information.

Using the multidimensional data collected through the website, health professionals can get a realistic idea of community infection. It can also help in identifying hotspots in community to direct testing and containment activity and phased removal of lockdown.