Flatten.ca is quickly becoming a go-to source of information about how COVID-19 is spreading across Canada

About one week ago, when the University of Toronto moved all classes online, and first year engineering student Shrey Jain moved off campus, he started wondering what he could do to help stop the spread of the deadly COVID-19 coronavirus.

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Though just 18 years old, in a matter of days, Jain has emerged as the public face of Flatten.ca, a website that’s quickly becoming a go-to source of information about how COVID-19 is spreading across Canada.

Between Friday morning and Saturday afternoon, around 110,000 people visited the website to answer a brief survey about their age, whether they’ve experienced symptoms and their approximate location. That information was compiled into a heat map, so that anyone can visit the website and see what’s happening in their neighbourhood, including the number of potential cases and vulnerable people.

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“I wasn’t expecting to be as big it is,” said Jain, who added that his team is working on the website for 12 to 14 hours a day, even as they simultaneously finish up their classes.

The project started when Jain, who has been participating in hackathons since high school, texted a few friends to see if anyone had ideas about how to slow the spread. To his surprise, people jumped on the idea, and now Flatten.ca’s team has grown to about 30 people, including students from McMaster University, University of New Brunswick and University of Waterloo, as well as some high profile advisors, such as Geoffrey Hinton.

Photo by Flatten.ca

Hinton, sometimes called the ‘godfather of artificial intelligence,’ is an emeritus professor of computer science at the University of Toronto, that Jain connected with through one of his professors. He also works for Google, which provided server space to ensure the website won’t crash as the number of users grows.

Through some of Hinton’s connections at the Vector Institute of Technology, a Toronto-based machine learning research hub, Jain dialed in to a conference call earlier last week, in which Dominic Barton, ambassador to China, spoke about how other countries have flattened the curve and now Canada needs to find solutions.

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It’s just very important to be cognizant of norms about privacy here

Jain said that got him thinking. Theoretically, it might be possible to obtain a geolocation data set that could be used to help monitor the spread of the virus, but his team concluded many Canadians might not like the idea of being monitored that way.

That’s why they devised a way for Canadians to self-report information, he said.

“It’s just very important to be cognizant of norms about privacy here,” said Jain.

During the past few days, the team has been researching websites that have popped up in other countries, and developing the site further. They want users to update their information every 14 days, for example, and to make the site more accessible.

“We really care that the elderly fill it out,” he said, adding that soon, people will be able to respond for their entire family.

Right now, the majority of the users are located in the Greater Toronto Area, which has skewed some of the results, making the region look like the hardest hit. The hope is that the rest of the country will begin using the site in larger numbers.

They also plan to make changes as the conditions in Canada change. For example, it soon may be less relevant whether someone has travelled abroad in the past 14 days than whether they’ve travelled to a hot spot in Canada.

Meanwhile, they all have pushed their class work back in the list of priorities. Jain said he’s been surprised about how devoted the team is, but the experience is providing its own teaching moments.

“We’ve been given the opportunity to work on this, and we’re getting traction, so who cares what (grades) we get in school? Let’s just go with this,” Jain said.