Noemie Elhadad: CovidWatcher: a citizen-science platform for tracking impact of the pandemic (covid-19 symposium)

Summary by: Arooba Ahmed (CC '23)

      CovidWatcher was formed from joint work from biomedical informatics, SIPA, and division of infectious disease. 
      There are many stakeholders looking for information of COVID, including public health officials and community organizations. Therefore, this is just one of many platforms to inform people on the next steps on the pandemic. This is not a treatment or decision tool. Rather, it is a platform that pays more attention to privacy and sensitivity of questions and provides a dashboard for different stakeholders to explore data and look at trends. 
      The data comes from many rapid (1-3 min) surveys. The program works with mapping each of the questions to individual census tract levels (zip codes) in the city. They are able to incorporate new surveys, such as one for healthcare workers, and also many aspects (mental/emotional health). They also integrated a healthcare kit aspect which allows tracking of fitness, temperature, and movement.
     They have both website and mobile applications which are ready for about one million participants. They are also working with bioethics people to help make decisions about CovidWatcher.