The Danes wish to know more about the coronavirus

post by Ruby · 2020-03-14T16:39:46.697Z · LW · GW · 3 comments

This is a link post for https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/03/the-danes-wish-to-know-more-about-the-coronavirus.html

Denmark has the 4th highest per capita number of [confirmed] infections worldwide after Italy, Norway, South Korea. This is from a friend I originally made through LW Copenhagen:

"Thanks for the excellent coverage on MR.

I lead a small team of tech workers in Copenhagen, who are donating our time and money towards building a covid-19 self-reporting tool for those citizens not (yet) in contact with health care services.

As countries shift from containment to “flatten the curve” strategies, authorities lose track of the number of non-critical cases, and to which degree people adhere to social distancing dictums. This makes it hard to predict the number if ICU beds needed a few days into the future. We’re aiming to solve this by asking all Danes for daily status updates.

Denmark is a good testing ground, but we’ll open source everything, and are building with developing countries in mind. We’re aiming to launch Monday — currently working on a green light from local health authorities.

We’re determining which data to collect. We’d love it if you’d help by asking your audience: “What daily self reported measures would you most like to see from the complete population Denmark?” (or some variation thereof).

There is of course a tradeoff between data fidelity and engagement.

What we’re considering:

Are there comparable efforts to do this elsewhere?"

3 comments

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comment by madhatter · 2020-03-16T22:56:54.265Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Hey, I'm a student at the University of Copenhagen in Bioinformatics/Computer Science and I'd like to help any way I can. If there's anything I can do to help let me know.

comment by Lukas_Gloor · 2020-03-14T17:42:48.264Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Is there a case for installing as few features as possible to make sure uptake is/remains high? I could imagine that even just going from 2 questions/options to 3 questions/options could decrease usage, if it's off-putting to have to answer several questions.

Replies from: wizzwizz4
↑ comment by wizzwizz4 · 2020-03-14T18:45:39.426Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Perhaps just have the first question(s) be mandatory, and then have a "submit" option shown at the bottom of the screen (in blue or orange, probably) while the optional questions are being completed, and have the button change to green when they're all completed.

And getting more points for completing things, but also points for consecutive-day streaks – if points are around at all. But points are generally a good way of keeping engagement, and for this kind of thing I'd even drop my taboo on letting people import friend lists from Facebook et al. to show a leaderboard.