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Covid Symptom Tracker was developed at King’s College and at the Guy and St Thomas Hospitals in London in collaboration with the company Zoe Global Ltd.
The app was recently launched in Sweden and is already used in the UK and the United States.
The user declares his year of birth, his length and weight and his postal code. Later, questions about health and symptoms you may have had lately are answered.
“Do not diagnose”
– The app was launched in Sweden as a research project. Paul Franks, professor of medical epidemiology at Lund University, is not designed to provide individual feedback when making diagnoses or being used for follow-up contact.
Paul Frank and his colleague María Gómez, a professor of physiology, would like to see the information collected through the application be used by the Public Health Agency.
“It can show where testing should be intensified”
– If you can see how fast the virus spreads in different parts of the country, you could, for example, see where it could intensify the tests, says María Gómez.
If the user reports symptoms without being screened for covid-19, how does he know that the information is relevant to the investigation of this particular virus?
– Researchers in the UK have been able to identify a number of symptoms that are typical of the crown in people who have not become seriously ill, which can be helpful in analyzing the data, says Gómez.
Is there a risk that the application may give an incorrect image of the coronal state?
– In all models based on probability calculations, there is always a certain risk. But in the UK, for example, influenza and covid have been very different.
Tegnell: “I’m not sure about the added value”
State epidemiologist Anders Tegnell has previously expressed skepticism about crown applications, and last week the launch of MSB’s new crown tool was halted at the request of the Public Health Authority.
Neither does Covid Symptom Tracker seem to interest Tegnell.
– I don’t know what added value it could give us on the aspect of the spread. We have good data, we do our own sample surveys and large studies with randomly selected sections of the population. It is more representative than a study based on voluntarily participating test subjects, says Tegnell.
