How Chicago is using technology to understand the efficacy of its measures

Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Chicago health officials state that data suggests that Chicago is finally “flattening the curve.” The presented data show that the rate of the reported cases is slowing down, while only 1 month ago the cases were doubling every 2 or 3 days.

The help of technology – DATA

Lightfoot revealed that Chicago’s department of public health has been partnering with BlueDot, a health care technology company, to obtain anonymous location data from their apps.

This technology is helping to understand if people are really following the lockdown so as to prompt action. The Mayor commented: “We’re actually able to use this to see how much our cell phones and other mobile devices across Chicago are staying home.”

The technology tracks the location of a device form midnight to 9 am pinging it every 30 minutes to check possible movements.

According to the data, in February ad March, 60% of the time the devices stayed at home (80% of them within a 200 meters radius).

Dr. Allison Arwady, CDPH Commissioner, noticed a correlation between these data and the flattening of the curve to comment: “This data is encouraging and shows that all of our efforts appear to be having the intended impact in helping to limit the spread of this virus. I want to thank the people of Chicago who absolutely have saved lives by staying home. But I want to be clear: this also tells us that we need to be abiding by these restrictions more now than ever because we haven’t yet gotten to the other side of the curve, where the number of daily cases begins to fall day after day. We need to get to the other side of the curve to be able to move forward as a city.”

Here the full report coming from the City of Chicago.

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