¶ COVID Near You
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COVID Near You was an American symptom reporting tool based in Boston, Massachusetts. It received self-reported COVID-19 symptom data and displayed it publicly on a map, and shared it with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
It operated as a sister tool to Flu Near You,[1] with which it was later combined and relaunched as Outbreaks Near Me.[2]
¶ History
In March 2020, COVID Near You was launched as a sister site of Flu Near You in order to "track the then emerging COVID-19 pandemic."[2:1] The platform was expanded to Canada on April 3, 2020, working in collaboration with researchers at the University of Toronto and Toronto Public Health.[3]
In December 2020, COVID Near You was renamed to Outbreaks Near Me and integrated the influenza tracking functions of Flu Near You.[2:2]
¶ Organization
COVID Near You was run by teams at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, along with the University of Toronto and Toronto Public Health in Canada.[2:3] It operated in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).[4]
Its base system was developed for Flu Near You by epidemiologists and software developers at Harvard Medical School, Boston Children's Hospital and a group of volunteers from across the technology industry. It was launched in 2012 by Ending Pandemics, Boston Children's Hospital, the American Public Health Association (APHA) and the Skoll Global Threats Fund.[2:4]
¶ Funding
The project was funded by:[1:1]
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- BlazeMeter
- Cloudflare
- Datadog
- MongoDB
- TechSoup
¶ External links
Who We Are. COVID Near You. Retrieved March 22, 2020, from https://web.archive.org/web/20200322233847/https://www.covidnearyou.org/# ↩︎ ↩︎
Who We Are. Outbreaks Near Me. Retrieved August 6, 2023, from https://web.archive.org/web/20230806165007/https://outbreaksnearme.org/ca/en-CA/who-we-are ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Lapointe-Shaw, L., Rader, B., Astley, C. M., Hawkins, J. B., Bhatia, D., Schatten, W. J., Lee, T. C., Liu, J. J., Ivers, N. M., Stall, N. M., Gournis, E., Tuite, A. R., Fisman, D. N., Bogoch, I. I., & Brownstein, J. S. (2020). Web and phone-based COVID-19 syndromic surveillance in Canada: A cross-sectional study. PLOS ONE, 15(10), e0239886. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239886 ↩︎
Jones, A. M. (2020, April 12). Has someone in your area been tested for COVID-19? A new website lets you know. CTV News. http://archive.today/2023.08.06-164036/https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/has-someone-in-your-area-been-tested-for-covid-19-a-new-website-lets-you-know-1.4892890 ↩︎