We know that only a small proportion of people infected with the coronavirus will manifest symptoms of the disease and most will heal at home without even undergoing medical tests. However, these people have been infected somewhere where others have also
become infected and may continue to become infected. If we had an application where people answer a questionnaire that allows them to be identified as infected according to the symptoms they experience and that also follows people's steps by GPS to record
the places they have been in the past few weeks, it would be possible to inform a global system that would discover the common sites visited by different patients. These sites would be identified as points of spread of the disease so that local health workers
could take the appropriate steps to stop the spread of the virus in these places. For example, a supermarket cashier may be infected without showing symptoms, but spreading the virus to customers. Once customers started to manifest symptoms, the app would
discover the supermarket as the common place where they have been and where they may have become infected. It would be possible to send alerts to other users of the app who have been at the supermarket in the past few weeks to isolate themselves for a precautionary
period.
If there is no longer someone working on such an application, here is my suggestion to anyone who can develop this type of application or take it to a company or public agency that can. It would be useful for all epidemics and of global reach.
Codelines
