Covid-19 is a pandemic disease with many risk factors for severe illness:
Ages 65 years and older
Alcoholism
Asthma
Certain occupations
Chronic kidney disease treated with dialysis
Chronic lung disease
Close contact with person with COVID‑19
Diabetes
Diarrhea
Gender male
Heart conditions, e.g., coronary artery disease, cardiomyopathies, hypertension
Hemoglobin Disorders, e.g., sickle cell disease
Immunocompromised, e.g., cancer, organ transplant, HIV, use of corticosteroids
Liver disease including cirrhosis
Living in nursing homes or long-term care
Loss of smell
Poverty and crowding
Pregnancy
Race/Ethnicity
Recent travel or residence in area with ongoing community spread of COVID-19
Respiratory disease
Severe obesity
Smoking
A community is a geographic area of highly to loosely organized groups based upon shared values, beliefs, goals or needs. Examples of groups are ethnic neighborhoods, retirement communities, schools, universities, churches, professions (farmers, laborers, merchants, legal, medical, military, social service), and shared-purpose groups (homeless, group homes for children and adults, jails, prisons, mental health care facilities, hospitals, assisted living, nursing homes).
CovidIQCovidIQ is a health information system that protects communities from Covid-19 by (1) monitoring health status, (2) tracking COVID-19 and other viral clinical symptoms, (3) identifying risks for viral spread, and, (4) recommending strategies for contact tracing and community protection. Community participants with no symptoms self-report every five days. Those with symptoms self-report every one or two days. Days or weeks before other methods, CovidIQ identifies viral risk in real-time, e.g., hot spots, cold spots, and places in between, and recommends who to test and what to do next.
CovidIQ MissionCovidIQ is a collaboration of over forty experts in medicine, epidemiology, data science and behavioral science. It is designed to enable communities worldwide to protect their health as follows:
× Supporting a collective responsibility to protect the health of everyone.
× Ensuring public health data is always public and personal data is private.
× Implementing medical testing that is cost-effective, accurate, and scalable.
× Guaranteeing everyone can self-report their symptoms using a simple method.
By recording symptoms continually, CovidIQ can report health status and viral spread in real‑time. Medical testing identifies those who are asymptomatic and COVID‑19 contagious, but it is expensive, time-consuming and only diagnostic on the date of the test. CovidIQ’s constant tracking, in contrast, is inexpensive, scalable to millions, and, most important, predictive in real-time. For example, CovidIQ could have predicted and helped avoid recent outbreaks in Germany and South Korea. Such early detection and response are critical in countries with weak medical capabilities and crowded slums such as Mumbai’s Dharavi and Lagos’ Makoko.
CovidIQ enables people anywhere in the world to report their symptoms in any language with any of the following methods:
× SMS via mobile phone
× Automated Voice Response (IVR) via any phone
× Scan Forms (similar to voting-by-mail)
× Touch Panels at public and non-public sites
× Person-to-Person interviews
× Toll-Free HELP
CovidIQ can detect symptoms of viral disease with a variety of survey methods:
Community Surveys tracking symptoms in rural areas, cities, counties.
Traveler Surveys collecting symptoms via drive-through or air traveler check-in
Large Group Surveys tracking symptoms in schools, universities, companies, etc.
Medical Surveys collecting symptoms as part of intake interviews by medical staff
Contact Surveys tracing contacts with those who test positive for COVID-19
After a community indicates significant clinical symptoms for COVID-19, CovidIQ responds by increasing symptom tracking in real‑time, reporting risk for COVID-19 infection and recommending how individuals and the community should respond. Similarly, when symptoms decrease, CovidIQ can enable data-based decisions to return a community toward more normal activity.
Among the difficult problems beyond the scope of CovidIQ are (1) getting people to practice protective measures, (2) identifying people who are asymptomatic and yet infectious, (3) tracing which people may have infected others, (4) monitoring each mutation of COVID-19 and its pathogenesis, and (5) developing an effective vaccine and vaccinating everyone.
In responding to COVID-19, CovidIQ protects privacy, anonymizes data and avoids intrusive technologies, e.g., security cameras, biometric scans, mobile phones, credit-cards and other commercial transactions.
Sample Community ReportCovidIQ is grounded in transparency and protection of privacy rights. To this end, CovidIQ provides reports to inform the authorized leaders of a community and the individuals who submit their symptoms.
Authorized members of a community can request any Community Symptom Report as often as needed. Below is an example based on self-reported symptoms by about 3000 members in a community of 7000. COVID Positive reports how many in the community tested positive for COVID-19 according to local medical authorities. Questions we might ask are: When did the most symptoms occur? Which symptoms might best predict an individual to become COVID Positive? Which symptoms changed most dramatically?
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