Coronavirus In Pittsburgh: Facebook Teams With Carnegie Mellon For Survey On Symptoms
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- Facebook is teaming with Carnegie Mellon University to gather symptom data on the coronavirus.
Beginning on Monday, CMU and Facebook are working to gather data about U.S. residents who are experiencing symptoms consistent with the coronavirus.
In a release, Carnegie Mellon said some Facebook users will see a link at the top of their news feed that leads to an optional survey by CMU.
"Information from the survey will be used by CMU for its pandemic forecasting efforts and also will be shared with other collaborating universities. Aggregate information from the survey will be shared publicly," the release said.
The goal is to gather data at the county level on people who have coronavirus symptoms.
"We don't have good data at this point regarding symptomatic infections," said Ryan Tibshirani, associate professor of statistics and machine learning, in a release. "People have been discouraged from visiting physician offices and hospitals. The only way to get this is with the survey."
CMU says the data has the potential to be extremely valuable for forecasts and surges in hospitalizations to come.
