When can the US reopen? Facebook map of coronavirus symptoms by county may help decide

Facebook released a new interactive map Monday that shows the prevalence of reported coronavirus symptoms by county, the company said.

The maps will be updated daily and are intended to help health officials determine where to send resources and decide when parts of the country can be reopened, NBC News reported.

The map uses information from a voluntary survey — developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh — that appeared on Facebook and asked users if they were experiencing symptoms associated with COVID-19 including cough, fever, shortness of breath or loss of smell, CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote in the Washington Post.

“Overall, since experiencing symptoms is a precursor to going to the hospital or becoming more seriously ill, these maps could be an important tool for governments and public health officials to make decisions on how to allocate scarce resources like ventilators and PPE, and eventually when it’s safe to start re-opening society,” Zuckerberg said, according to Axios.

The map appears to show data through April 12 and uses a color-coded key to signify the prevalence of symptoms. For instance, 3.56% of people surveyed in Navajo County, Arizona, reported symptoms associated with COVID-19, landing it in the highest bracket along with counties including Carbon County, Pennsylvania, at 3.35% and Mille Lacs County, Minnesota, at 3.7%.

The Delphi research team at Carnegie Mellon released their findings Monday and said they received about 1 million responses weekly from Facebook users, according to a news release.

They took responses to the survey and combined them with other information including medical claims and testing to make estimates about disease activity that are more comprehensive than those made from positive coronavirus tests alone, the release said.

Zuckerberg said Facebook is partnering with faculty from the University of Maryland to expand the survey globally.

“This is work that social networks are well-situated to do. By distributing surveys to large numbers of people whose identities we know, we can quickly generate enough signal to correct for biases and ensure sampling is done properly,” he wrote in the Post.

This story was originally published April 20, 2020 at 8:46 AM with the headline "When can the US reopen? Facebook map of coronavirus symptoms by county may help decide."