Smartphone app shows promise in tracking COVID-19 infections, study says
A rise in coronavirus-related symptoms is showing up in some states that have recently loosened social-distancing restrictions, causing concerns about increased hospitalizations and deaths, according to researchers in an ongoing study of smartphone app users nationwide.
The high-tech early-bird warning system — called the COVID Symptom Study, created by a team of United States and U.K. researchers — is designed to find emerging hot spots of the highly contagious disease and alert public health experts so they can better prepare for future outbreaks.
The COVID Symptom Study app is a crowdsourcing survey of virus-related symptoms that are reported by volunteers who downloaded it onto their smartphones.
First, users will be asked general information about themselves, like their age, home ZIP code and whether they've had certain disease.
Next, the app's symptom tracker asks users to report how they are feeling, and whether they've been treated or tested for COVID-19 and visited a hospital. The overall aim is to collect data about the overall spread of the virus in each area and identify high-risk hotspots across the country as an early warning system that can be used by government health experts in battling the disease.
Privacy is protected and users are not asked specific personal details like birth date or address.
Trending data collected in the past week from 250,000 smartphone app users suggests more COVID-19 cases may be on the way in some states like Texas and Georgia that have partially reopened, the researchers said. New York’s stay-at-home order has been in place since March 22, but reopening is happening in some upstate regions.
Trending data collected in the past week from 250,000 smartphone app users suggests more COVID-19 cases may be on the way in some states that have partially reopened, researchers said. Credit: Newsday
“We do see some alarming increases in symptoms in parts of the country where restrictions are started to be loosened,” said Harvard University epidemiologist Dr. Andrew Chan, a senior member of the team that oversees the app. “The concern is that those [symptoms] might be an indicator that, in a few days or a week’s time, we could see again spikes in actually confirmed cases of COVID.”
With much of the United States still lacking widespread on-demand testing, Chan said this free crowdsourcing app will help fill the void in understanding ongoing trends with the virus, especially among young smartphone users who may not be counted in official infection totals.
Earlier this month, a study published by the group showed that two-thirds of smartphone app users who tested positive for infection in both the U.K. and the United States reported a loss of smell or taste — a symptom usually reported with less frequency than fever, dry coughs and headaches in other medical studies.
But Chan said the smartphone app may have more importance as an early warning surveillance system for spotting symptoms in real time as they spread across the nation, particularly if they develop into full-fledged outbreaks of COVID-19, which has so far claimed close to 90,000 U.S. lives.
Chan said data from reopened places in Texas and Georgia of reported symptoms — many of them mild but potential warning signs of more serious illness — will help authorities prepare to fight the deadly disease. (Currently, confirmed COVID-19 cases in Georgia have gone down since reopening, but have recently gone up in Texas).
With information from a growing number of smartphone app users, this approach will allow researchers to look ahead and use mapping techniques to show how the reported symptoms relate to future testing, hospitalizations and death rates in various states, he said. “Data on hospitalizations and death rates really are an indicator very late of what is happening,” he explained.
The smartphone app system was developed by Chan, who is also chief of the Clinical and Translational Epidemiology Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, as well as researchers at King's College London and Stanford University School of Medicine, working in partnership with ZOE Global — a health science company based in Boston and London. The study began collecting U.S. data in late March.
It’s not clear if New York health experts will be relying on this crowdsourcing app or some other approach. They are currently preparing an extensive “contact tracing” system — using as many as 17,000 paid tracers to identify and alert those who came in contact with an infected person who tested positive for the virus.
“We are evaluating various technology applications that could assist in the initiative, but the key to effective contact tracing is direct outreach by individuals to work with a positive case to successfully identify their contacts,” state health department representative Erin Silk said. As part of the New York effort, health experts at Bloomberg Philanthropies are also helping develop three smartphone apps to provide information to patients in the contact tracing program.
Chan said his inexpensive crowdsourcing approach is meant to complement government-funded contact tracing, but is quicker in identifying important trends and responding to them immediately. He said other methods and studies often don’t account adequately for those with mild or hard-to-detect symptoms, which he said accounts for about 25% of those infected by the virus.
“Contact tracing is important but there is a limited number of people that can do it, and there is a limited number of people that can be contacted in a reasonable amount of time,” Chan said. “We think of this app as an earlier surveillance device that is most effective.”
Along with those in the United States, the COVID Symptom Study app has more than 3 million participants worldwide who report their health daily, even if they feel well. By getting a big-picture view of the virus spread, Chan and his fellow researchers hope to “play a crucial role in aiding us out of lockdown and preventing a second wave.”
Some newly developed COVID-19 apps have raised privacy concerns, like one being developed by Apple and Google. Chan said his downloadable app does not track specific locations or individuals, but rather collects data as part of a crowdsourcing survey of symptoms from a large sample of people, which he hopes will help government health experts combat the virus in the days ahead.
