Title
: Project Track & Trace: Predicting & Responding to the Spread & Impact of COVID-19
Description
: As the nation fights an invisible enemy, COVID-19, it has been incredibly difficult to get a grip on the runaway problem, due to a lack of reliable, up to date, and useful data sets.
Our initiative wants to combine a last century technology, the cell phone, and a 21st century technology, machine learning, to create a multitude of data-driven solutions to the COVID-19 crisis.
Data collection and predictive analysis are the two key components of the project, whereby we will work within the constraints of the Bangladeshi economic and public health context to identify segments of the country that are particularly vulnerable to the COVID-19 crisis, both economically and medically, so they may be targeted for support. Furthermore, we will also be proactively tracking the prevalence of COVID-19 symptoms and monitoring changes in prevalence levels in order to reduce the government reaction time when responding to new hot zones.
In order to do this, we intend to collaborate with telecom providers to do large scale nationwide surveys, powered by an army of volunteer stat-at-home call-center agents. We are aware that the government has already initiated a hotline to report coronavirus symptoms with all the telecom service providers, however we believe that a citizen-initiated process will lead to a large percentage of non-responses and poorer reliability of data. A proactive phone survey approach will ensure greater responses and reliability of the data, which may then be used to augment the analyses the telecom providers are already conducting.
Phone surveys will be conducted on a daily or bi-daily basis, to capture particularly relevant data, such as impact of COVID-19 on communities, and availability of aid. Depending on the available support we may be able to zoom into numbers representative at the Upazila level or even further.
