so you can notify if you have flu or Covid

He Higher Council of Scientific Research (CSIC) has just launch EpidemiRadar, an online platform that invites any person residing in Spain to report if they suffer from flu or COVID-19 to know the true extent of respiratory viruses in Spain, since “people with symptoms are not always officially registered.”

This tool, carried out within the framework of the European data science project EOSC-SIESTA, the European Influenzanet network and the CSIC Interdisciplinary Global Health Platform, has a “simple” operation, since it is enough to register on the ‘epidemiradar.es’ website and respond to an initial questionnaire.

“From there, participants receive a weekly email to report their health status. If they do not have symptoms, the process does not take more than 30 seconds; otherwise, the form is completed in just a few minutes,” they say.

Response data is anonymized and aggregated to represent by regions and provinces on a weekly basis, illustrating on maps the presence and evolution of flu or similar symptoms throughout the country. This data allows the scientific community to detect patterns and anticipate outbreaks, improving scientific knowledge about the spread of infectious diseases.

“Every person counts. The more volunteers participate, the more accurate the photography of the health situation and the better we can anticipate future epidemics,” highlights José J. Ramasco, CSIC researcher at the Institute of Interdisciplinary Physics and Complex Systems (IFISC-CSIC-UIB) and project coordinator. “The system has potential beyond respiratory infectious diseases, with Epidemiradar being a first step towards a collaborative system for detecting diseases in the population,” he adds.

EpidemiRadar is the Spanish node of the European Influenzanet network, a public health initiative active in more than ten countries. Its objective is to take advantage of citizen collaboration to complement traditional surveillance of influenza and other respiratory viruses. This tool will provide incidence data that is essential for defining public health policies and for analysis and modeling in computational epidemiology.