Help build a national picture of COVID-19 with COVIDNearYou

Severe lack of COVID-19 testing means we need alternate methods to understand community transmission.

COVIDNearYou, a crowdsourcing platform, has been launched. Take a few seconds to report your symptoms and help build a national picture of the coronavirus. Go to www.covidnearyou.org.

Created by epidemiologists and software developers at Harvard, Boston Children's Hospital and a group of volunteers from across the technology industry. COVIDNearYou uses crowdsourced data to visualize maps to help citizens and public health agencies identify current and potential hot spots for the recent pandemic coronavirus, COVID-19.

The website is a sister tool of Flu Near You, created by Ending Pandemics and Boston Children's Hospital in 2012 and maintained by the Boston Children's Hospital team.

COVIDNearYou relies on voluntary participation from the general public, asking you to take a few seconds to report if you or your family members have been healthy or sick.

They analyze thousands of reports and map them to generate local and national views of COVID-like illness, providing public health officials and researchers with real-time, anonymous information that could help end the COVID-19 pandemic, and prevent the next one from happening.

With your help, we can all see what's happening and better still - you have the knowledge to protect yourself and your family against disease.

Thanks to the generous donors who made this work possible, including MongoDB, Datadog and Cloudflare.

Thanks to the product managers, engineers, and designers who donated their time to make this happen (Aly Cabral, Amrit Dhir, Ashish Jha, Chase Rigby, Domino Weir, Eric Chen, Jared Hawkins, Jeffrey Ling, Jishnu Menon, John Brownstein, Jorge Imperial, Kara Sewalk, Lakshmi Yajurvedi, Leobardo Mora Castro, Mark Oglia, Matthew G. Montleone, Mohamed El Mahallawy, Nick Jonas, Nitin Gujral, Prem Ramaswami, Pujaa Rajan, Sampath Chennuri, Shailesh Mahajan, Sindy Tan, Steven Baker, Tim Driscoll, Trey Guinn, Veronica Pinchin, Xiaoming Jia )