Facebook launching worldwide project to track coronavirus

Facebook will launch a worldwide project to track coronavirus, Mark Zuckerberg has said.

The company has recently started rolling out a survey that asks people about their symptoms in an attempt to track the spread of covid-19 in the US, and will soon make it available globally, the Facebook boss said.

The research is being run in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, which will publish its initial findings today. Mr Zuckerberg stressed that only those health researchers see the information from Facebook's respondents, and that it cannot access the results.

The researchers are getting around a million responses a week, he said, and the results are already tallying with other publically available data on cases. Facebook hopes the responses will therefore be reliable enough to predict the spread of the disease as well as give precise insights into how the disease is spreading by county.

"The results indicate, for example, that in some New York City suburbs, an estimated 2 to 3 percent of people are experiencing covid-19-like symptoms," he wrote in an article published in the Washington Post.

Mr Zuckerberg said Facebook can "uniquely help" researchers and promoted the role of social networks in generating such data. "By distributing surveys to large numbers of people whose identities we know, we can quickly generate enough signal to correct for biases and ensure sampling is done properly," he said.

As well as rolling out the survey globally, Facebook will build a tool that lets researchers everywhere access the results from the survey, he said. "We’re hopeful that this will help governments and public health officials around the world who might not otherwise have this kind of precise data to make decisions in the weeks and months ahead," he wrote.

Mr Zuckerberg said the company was also collaborating with universities, healthcare organisations and governments across the world to provide other help, such as artificial inteligence tools to try and predict needs for resources such as personal protective equipment.

Despite Facebook's attempts to help with the coronavirus outbreak, it has been criticised for serving as a platform for a wide variety of misinformation and other problematic posts. The company has rolled out a series of responses to the virus, which have ranged from anti-misinformation campaigns to new product features that improve group video chats.