Thermometer Firm Pivots to Track Virus
Chart 1: Delaware County’s Reported COVID-19 cases from March 4 – 22, 2020 (delcopa.gov). COVID-19 first appears in official County reports on March 6.
At some point each evening, a nightly news anchor covering the COVID-19 pandemic will turn to the camera and ask a staff reporter whether the nation has flattened the curve — meaning whether the growth in new cases has significantly slowed. The staff reporter usually answers, “We don’t know, because we don’t know what’s happening among people who haven’t been tested.”
Chart 2: The Kinsa, Inc. US Health Weather Map for Delaware County, PA (healthweather.us). The county first reaches “atypical illness’ status on March 4, 2020, two days before the first COVID-19 cases are officially reported.
One company may help with timely information. Kinsa Inc., a health-technology company based in San Francisco, makes a digital “smart” thermometer that collects data from its several thousand customers via an app, and uses the data to predict flu outbreaks. In a March 18 New York Times article “Can Smart Thermometers Track the Spread of the Coronavirus?” Kinsa’s owner, Inder Singh, explained how he had recently re-purposed the data to track the spread of COVID-19. The data — a literal fever map — can be viewed at healthweather.us.
Locally, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Delaware County grew from zero on March 6 to 38 on March 21. Two days previously, on March 4, fever readings on the Kinsa company’s website for Delaware County had surged higher than past flu season trajectories would have predicted, thus seemingly anticipating the later emergence of newly confirmed COVID-19 cases.
Nita Nehru, a company representative, agreed that Kinsa’s data seemed to have predicted the rise in cases. “We are seeing atypical levels of [fever] in your county,” she wrote in an email. Trends from the county’s confirmed cases and Kinsa’s smart-thermometer data both suggest that the county has not yet flattened its Covid-19 curve.
As Kinsa updates their map — and as Delaware County hospitals report new cases of COVID-19 — the company will monitor whether their forecasting methods can reliably predict changes in the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases several days in advance.
Hillard Pouncy is a political scientist who lives in Wallingford.
