How Surveillance Could Save Lives Amid a Public Health Crisis
For each new transmission of coronavirus, imagine the “tick tick tick” of a stopwatch. At least 2 million adults in the US could require hospitalization over the course of the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates; that’s more than double the nation’s supply of hospital beds. Curfews and social distancing will hopefully help mete out the number of infections slowly—because 2 million patients over 18 months will be more manageable than 2 million over six months. Yet all such predictions are essentially guesswork at this point.
Leaders are looking for guidance on when to close schools or order residents to shelter in place, and whether the measures they’ve already taken are working. Early research on coronavirus suggests that isolating people soon after they become symptomatic plays the “largest role in determining whether an outbreak [is] controllable.”
Officials have a powerful potential surveillance tool unavailable in past epidemics: smartphones. Government officials are anxious to tap the information from phones to help monitor and blunt the pandemic. White House officials are asking tech companies for more insight into our social networks and travel patterns. Facebook created a disease mapping tool that tracks the spread of disease by aggregating user travel patterns.
