The Coronavirus outbreak in 2020 is similar in many ways to the Tohoku earthquake / Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown that Safecast was formed to address 9 years ago. We find ourselves again trying to better understand what is happening. In part because the situation is changing so rapidly but also due to a lack of transparency, conflicting reports, partisan spin, and intentional misinformation make it hard to keep up. We are trying to identify ways that our experience can help in this new situation. Currently we are providing the following:

Newsletter

Several times a week we send out a few bullet points, the high level news for the day relating to COVID-19 and what we think is important. Consistent with Safecast positions, we’ll strive for a level headed approach, with the goal to give us all better understanding of this complex and rapidly changing situation. As we take further steps at Safecast we’ll announce them here as well.



Testing Map

One of Safecast’s founding beliefs is that people should have access to reliable and accurate information in order to make decisions about their own safety and that of their friends and families. We believe people should have easy access to COVID-19 testing options to give reassurances about their own health and safety, and to help them make better decisions during this global emergency. Currently, however, in many places around the world, official testing information is ambiguous and incomplete, and people are dependent on single sources of official information which may be neither relevant nor trustworthy. With the help and input of people around the world, this map will begin to provide a more accurate picture of the relative difficulty of obtaining testing in various locales. It’s our hope that by providing an alternative source of credible crowdsourced information, this map will become a useful tool with which to better target resources and hold governments and officials accountable.

This map can be found at covid19map.safecast.org

For further information about the map and how to use it is available in the following languages:



Experience

We’ve written some articles that may be of interest. Specifically “Best Practices In Reference To COVID-19” and “What the Fukushima meltdowns taught us about how to respond to coronavirus” are two articles from early March that attempt to apply some lessons we learned after 3/11 that may be useful today. Additionally, the COVID-19 category on our blog contains all of our ongoing discussion, announcements and analysis.