![]() Outbreaks Near Me is working closely with SurveyMonkey to bring even more data into the platform, and understand how to turn the data they capture into nationally representative information, Brownstein says. SurveyMonkey, through its online polling infrastructure, has access to a wide range of people-nearly 2 million daily users. Partnering with SurveyMonkey is enabling Outbreaks Near Me to account for some of the gaps and biases in their self-reported data. We have to account for that and be considerate in how we extend our findings.” ![]() “We have much more engagement from the coastal states, and relatively less in the center of the country. “Our data skews slightly older, and slightly more toward people that think about public health and want to engage,” Brownstein says. ![]() Since the launch of Outbreaks Near Me, Brownstein says, there have been millions of data points on individual symptoms entered into the platform, which have translated into insights about spread in communities that the Outbreaks Near Me team has been able to share with major players like the Centers for Disease Control.īecause the initial launch of Outbreaks Near Me relied primarily on people learning about the platform and opting into self-reporting their data, there are some gaps in the data. Similarly as with Flu Near You, the team behind Outbreaks Near Me wants to encourage people to get engaged with producing much-needed public health data during COVID-19, and to provide a way for participants to understand the spread of the virus in their community. Flu Near You is ongoing today, and provided the blueprint for BCH and its partners to quickly develop Outbreaks Near Me this year. “We wanted to put the ‘public’ back in public health by engaging people directly in the surveillance of emerging infectious diseases and making everyone an active participant,” Brownstein says. Obviously we do get information about people interacting with healthcare providers and testing data, but general symptoms in the community, which represents the vast majority of the way illness presents, goes completely unreported.” Boston Children’s Hospital and partners launched a program nearly a decade ago called Flu Near You (an effort inspired, in part, by the movie Contagion), through which people could self-report symptoms through a web portal. “We had a lack of information about illness in the community. “We embarked on a journey of crowdsourcing disease information close to 10 years ago,” he says. In addition to Outbreaks Near Me, initiatives like COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer-led effort to compile data on cases, hospitalizations, and deaths have formed in response to a lag in federally coordinated data collection.īut the need for better data on the prevalence of disease symptoms in a community predates the current pandemic, Brownstein says. Their aim is that the new dashboard will provide more insights and detailed information to people who self-report their data-and equip policymakers and local leaders with a tool to understand the factors that impact the spread of the virus in their region.ĬOVID-19 has turned a spotlight on the need for crowdsourced data. All of these metrics are critical for understanding COVID-19 in communities, Brownstein says. ![]() The revamped dashboard, filterable by state, now shows self-reported COVID-19 symptom data, along with data on political affiliation, education level, attitudes about mask-wearing, healthcare access, and more. While the recently renamed Outbreaks Near Me has been ongoing since nearly the beginning of the pandemic, the relaunched dashboard reflects an expanded view of relevant data for understanding COVID-19. Underneath key epidemiological metrics like cases, test positivity rate, and deaths are social and political factors, like mask-wearing and access to healthcare, that influence how the pandemic spreads.īrownstein and Boston Children’s Hospital have teamed with Harvard Medical School, SurveyMonkey, and Tableau to create Outbreaks Near Me (formally COVID Near You), an effort to collect and visualize crowdsourced data on the pandemic in the US. But that’s just one layer of the necessary data. Specifically in the US, COVID-19 testing is not happening at the volume required to produce truly representative data, says John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital. Outbreaks Near Me (formerly known as COVID Near You) is a collaboration between Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, SurveyMonkey, and Tableau to visualize pandemic data.Īs the COVID-19 pandemic has persisted for nearly an entire year, one thing is clear: No matter how much data exists on the virus, it’s never enough. Reference Materials Toggle sub-navigation.Teams and Organizations Toggle sub-navigation. ![]()
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