Volunteer group develops a COVID-19 testing location database for the U.S.

The effort to combat the spread of the coronavirus pandemic globally relies on testing as a core factor of the current strategy, which primarily focuses on isolating men to slow the transmission of COVID-1 9 and give investigates time to develop potential cares and inoculations. The availability and amount of testing can help chart how the virus is moving through a population, to inform and direct required quarantine and contact drawing measures, but one key data point might be the spread and availability of testing sites.

A brand-new group of volunteer coders and medical professionals, including Air Force software organization Kessel Run‘s Chief Data Officer Andrew Kemendo, and data-driven doctor and researcher Jorge A. Caballero, have created a brand-new findecovidtesting.com website, which aims to provide up-to date location info for all measuring websites in the U.S.

Immediately, please note that a resource like this is not meant as a directory for private individuals who are looking to show up at a test site, expecting to receive diagnostics. Health officials and professionals are attempting to roll out testing as far and wide they’re able, but for the safety of frontline works, and in order to allocate restraint render of testing cloths as efficiently as possible, you should always merely consult with a medical professional via telehealth, or use one of the various official online screening tools in order to get a test. Time registering up somewhere won’t get you a test, and could place a lot of other people in danger.

That said, this database, which was built by a crew of around 15 developers making remotely one such courses of simply one week, should be viewed as a potential resource to inform those working on the country’s emergency response and COVID-1 9 mitigation policy, or efforts to ensure that testing is available across the country in a way that accurately addresses population needs, and that can provide a full picture of the extent of the actual virus spread.

It likewise could be very useful for individuals- plied it’s used in tandem with screening and telehealth advice to make sure that people are getting researched based on case prioritization, and according to all possible safety guidelines for the health of those doing the testing.

Kemendo also says that the scheme is to potentially scale this to cover countries outside the U.S ., accommodated the group can find a scalable direction to populate the site data. Right now, the locate info is being raked and supported manually, while the team works on some kind of infrastructure that might help automate the process as more measure websites come online.

The effort and its resulting data “isnt gonna be” monetized at all, Kemendo says, and while it has no single patron, the company is working with approvals from both Google Cloud Platform and AWS for running the backend. The crew is currently looking for suggestions on how best to scale, and increase the manual workload involved with maintaining an up-to-date listing, and their GitHub project is available here.