PJTVNews

As we work with health officials to fight Covid-19, one way Facebook can uniquely help is by providing aggregate insights from our community on where and how the outbreak is spreading.

Starting today, we’re going to begin showing an opt-in symptom survey run by health researchers at Carnegie Mellon University asking whether you’re experiencing any of the symptoms associated with Covid-19. By answering the survey, you can contribute to the Covid-19 research effort even if you’re healthy. (Your replies will not be accessible to us, and this survey is not a replacement for contacting a doctor if you need medical attention.)

Since experiencing symptoms is often a precursor to going to the hospital or getting more seriously ill, if this works, it can produce a weekly map that may help more accurately forecast how many cases hospitals will see in the days ahead, as well as an early indicator of where the outbreak is growing and where the curve is being successfully flattened.

Researchers and health officials think the data from these surveys can help determine where to allocate health resources like ventilators, where to tighten lockdown orders, and eventually which counties can safely start opening back up again.

We’re starting to roll this out in the US this week, and if the results are promising then we will quickly expand this globally in the days ahead.

In addition to this symptom survey, today we’re also releasing several new Disease Prevention Maps from our Data for Good program that show in aggregate where people are traveling and interacting between regions. This data may help experts forecast which places may have outbreaks in the days to come.

A critical part of the Data for Good program is we’ve developed partnerships with academic researchers that enable us to produce these aggregate reports while protecting everyone’s privacy and individual data. As governments seek to use data in new ways to get ahead of this outbreak, it is important that we maintain our privacy principles and have clear policies for these kinds of use. We’ll share more on this soon as well.