COVIDcast Now Monitoring Daily U.S. Mask Use, COVID-19 Testing
Nationwide trends in mask use, access to COVID-19 tests and test results are now being monitored by Carnegie Mellon University and shared publicly as part of a symptom survey distributed daily to Facebook users.
Since April, CMU's Delphi Research Group has been collecting real-time data on self-reported COVID-19 symptoms nationwide, providing county-level information about the coronavirus pandemic that is updated continuously and available from no other source. The survey has now been expanded to include questions about how people are responding to public health recommendations, such as mask use, and whether people are getting the access to COVID-19 testing that they want.
"Some of these topics were partially addressed by the original survey, but we knew that as the pandemic changed and public health priorities adapted, our survey had to change, too," said Alex Reinhart, assistant teaching professor in the Department of Statistics and Data Science and a member of the Delphi group.
Aggregated data from the survey is updated each day and shared publicly via the COVIDcast website. Data also is shared in greater detail with health researchers. Delphi uses the data to develop localized forecasts of COVID-19 activity.
