The creators of Instagram just launched their first new project since leaving Facebook: An app to track the spread of coronavirus
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Ben Gilbert
Apr 27, 2020, 01:51 IST
Rt.live
The co-creators of Instagram, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, just launched their first new project since leaving Facebook: Rt.live.
Rt.live is a data visualization website aimed directly at combating the coronavirus pandemic. It tracks the spread of the virus on a state-by-state basis.
"We believe Rt — the effective infection rate — is one of the best ways to understand how COVID is spreading," Krieger told TechCrunch. "We'd been talking about ways of working together and this came out of that."
But this week, the duo behind Instagram launched their first new project in years: It's called rt.live, and it's intended to help fight the coronavirus pandemic.
The "rt" in the project's name is a reference Rt, the "basic reproduction score" used in epidemiology to track whether a disease will spread. The site pulls in data from The COVID Tracking Project, and offers an Rt score for each of the 50 US states. (You may be familiar with R0 or "R nought," another measure of disease spread — the main difference between Rt and R0 is that Rt is dynamic. R0 measures how far a disease could potentially spread; Rt tracks how fast a disease is spreading at the current moment in time.)
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"Values over 1.0 mean we should expect more cases in that area," the site's description says, "values under 1.0 mean we should expect fewer."
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The site enables filtering based on geography, and by states that enacted shelter in place orders versus those that didn't.
The point of the site, Krieger told TechCrunch, is to assist state governments with data that can help them re-open.
"As states decide whether and how to open back up, they'll have to manage their infection rate carefully," he said. "And we hope dashboards like rt.live will be helpful in doing so."
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