This Covid-19 tracking app lets you help scientists study the coronavirus
If you'd like to feel that you're doing more in the battle against the coronavirus than self-isolating with Animal Crossing, then it's worth checking out the new Covid-19 tracking app aimed at helping scientists track the disease.
Developed by researchers at King's College London along with Guy's and St Thomas's hospitals, the Covid Symptom Tracker app will apparently help scientists identify high-risk areas and track how fast the virus is spreading. While it's been developed for the UK initially, it will be launching in the US on March 26.
The free app is keen to stress that it doesn't offer health advice, instead giving you the opportunity to do a daily one-minute self-report, even if you're healthy and have no symptoms.
Available for iOS and Android, the app asks you for some basic information like age and postcode, and also whether you have any existing medical conditions like diabetes and asthma. This will apparently also help the researchers discover who is most as risk from coronavirus too.
In the app's sign-up process it says that "no information you share will be used for commercial purposes", although the data will be available to King's College London, Guys and St Thomas' Hospitals and Zoe Global Limited (a health technology company that co-developed the app) and may also be shared with the NHS.
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A word of warning: in our time with the Covid Symptom Tracker app so far, it's proved quite buggy and it was initially tricky to create an account.
This may be down to the large number of initial signups – it apparently already has 200,000 users already – so the kinks will hopefully be ironed out soon with an update.
It's also good to see the app join a range of other tech-based projects that have been designed to help with fight against the coronavirus, including Folding@Home (which uses your spare computing horsepower to help scientists) and Google's coronavirus information hub.
To download the Covid Symptom Tracker app, head to these download links for Android and iOS.
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