20k+ Site Visitors in 5 Days:
Precise Solutions to Help the Average Person During COVID-19
Edited by Maya Crowden
As a data scientist and entrepreneur, I remember my disappointment with the data visualizations that came out in January and February as COVID-19 spread across the globe. Many visualizations closely resembled the Johns Hopkins dashboard of the world, built on Esri’s Operations Dashboard, albeit with different color schemes or geographic focuses. For a crisis so close to home for every individual and community, these visualizations were incredibly macro and didn’t connect with the viewer at a human level.
The blandness of these visualizations was no one’s fault — there simply wasn’t geospecific or more granular data of any kind available to the public at the time. The frustration I felt didn’t stem from the repetition of these maps and charts; it stemmed from the inability to do something — anything my team or I could do to help mitigate the crisis.
Launching the Platform #FlattenTheCurve
Two weeks ago, Raakin Iqbal, Founder and CEO of The Social App, and I started to change that. Combining our companies’ skills and technologies, we brought together testing site locations from across the web and housed these data in a clean and accessible platform for anyone in America to explore: http://covid19testing.today/.
Our mission in a time of crisis: Help and build a platform for the common good.
The platform provides a critical, free service to help everyone locate nearby Coronavirus testing sites and give them a sense of empowerment in a time when most of us feel helpless.
The reality in America is that not everyone who drives has health insurance or a primary care physician. There are people right now who are hesitating to seek medical assistance during this crisis. We hope our platform encourages those most vulnerable to seek medical attention and be able to plan and visualize in their minds their trip to a nearby testing center should they or a loved one need to go.
Phase Two: Connecting at the State and Local Levels
We are receiving visitors from all fifty states, across all age groups and have been featured in The Hill, Business and Markets Insider, the New York Post, BGR, and other news organizations.
However, the platform is only as useful as the information it houses, and we are seeking partnerships with cities and states to align the most current information about testing locations to our site.
Our goal in Phase Two: Help hospitals plan for patient surges and identify new outbreaks as they occur in real time.
We are able to identify new outbreaks through anonymous surveys, which we will deploy this week to check on-site visitors’ symptoms as well as if and when they plan on visiting a testing center. This bypasses the time required currently to identify hotspots via an individual carrying Coronavirus to 1) visit a testing center, 2) receive results, and 3) have these results reported through the hospitals and urgent care centers.
In other words, real-time data means that more lives can be saved through rapid preventative measures. It also means that we can predict if there will be a surge in testing site visitors and help manage in-patient flows.
All of this is possible through a simple process of:
1) A local health department sharing current testing center information with us to share on the platform
2) Sharing our platform with the community
3) Providing aggregated insights to local officials to help them contain hotspots and predict and manage testing center flows
Partnerships
Please do not hesitate to reach out to me or Raakin Iqbal if you or someone you know is interested in partnering with us. We have just begun to roll out Phase Two. The capacity of our platform to help flatten the curve depends on the partnerships we all form now as the Coronavirus continues to impact our communities through the summer and beyond.
— Theo Jae-Ho Goetemann, Founder of Basil Labs
