Covid Symptom Tracker app aims to help stop coronavirus' spread
British researchers are hoping to slow the spread of the coronavirus in the United Kingdom with their new app.
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British researchers have developed an app to track the spread of coronavirus and figure out who is most at risk as a way to mitigate the disease's spread.
Known as the Covid Symptom Tracker, the free app asks users to fill in data including age, sex and postal code as well as questions on a range of existing medical conditions, such as heart disease and asthma.
App users are then reportedly asked to spend one minute per day to report on how they feel and answer questions about various different symptoms, including coughs, fever and fatigue.
“The concept is it is an early warning radar device because we are asking about non-classical symptoms as well, because many people are reporting non-persistent cough, or feeling unwell or a strange feeling of a lack of taste, or chest tightness that aren’t in the classical list but if we see it across the country in clusters we know they are probably real [symptoms of Covid-19],” Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, who is leading the work, told The Guardian.
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The app is a collaborative effort between researchers at King's College London and Guy's and St Thomas' hospitals, along with the health data company ZOE.
They hope the technology will provide real-time information that aids in slowing down the spread of the virus in the United Kingdom.
“The immediate thing is we will get known clusters of disease at different levels of severity all over the country and we will know what is going on,” he explained to the British publication.
As of Tuesday afternoon, there are just over 8,000 cases of COVID-19 in the U.K. and 423 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University and Medicine real-time map.
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