Florida

Cyber tools for predicting COVID-19’s spread

 

The Spanish Influenza. Chart showing mortality from the 1918 influenza pandemic in the US and Europe. Wikipedia commons.

The New York Times had a remarkable story yesterday morning by Donald G. McNeil Jr. , which talked about a company (Kinsa) that markets smart thermometers. The company can use the data on fevers from these devices to foretell where the outbreak will grow, before that data shows up in other sources.  You can see the company’s map here. As the NYT article says, there is so much interesting data here.

As someone who has spent a lot of time in Florida (my mother was a mystery writer, who set her novels in the bars of West Florida) I am deeply worried by the data on southeast Florida, as well as around Tampa. And even some of northern Florida, such as Duval county, has high levels of atypical fevers. But what is happening in Michigan? The map around Detroit has not lit up as red as Miami, but there is a swath in the south of the state where the levels of atypical fevers have raised. The swatch stretches as far west in the state as Kent county. I wouldn’t have expected what appears to be happening in Utah county, and Salt Lake county, Utah. But these counties still do not light up as much as Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade do in Florida. …

Zika in the continental U.S.

Digital photo taken by Marc Averette. The downtown Miami skyline as seen from I-195 5/16/2008. Wikipedia Commons
Digital photo taken by Marc Averette. The downtown Miami skyline as seen from I-195 5/16/2008. Wikipedia Commons

Zika has already become a significant health issue in Puerto Rico, where there have been more than 5,500 infections. More than 600 of these infections have been in pregnant women. The outbreak has also set off massive public debates on the island regarding everything from insecticides to the structure of local government. It was inevitable that Zika would eventually appear in the mainland United States. Still, it couldn’t help but be surprising to see a CDC warning about travel by pregnant women to two counties (Miami-Dade and Broward) in Florida. It’s important to keep this news in perspective. So far only 14 people have been reported to have locally acquired Zika, in a very restricted geographic area in Miami. Mosquito control activities have gone into high gear in this area. One can hear an audio copy of the briefing about this news here on the CDC website. The CDC also has a dedicated webpage on Zika, which is a helpful site for information regarding the epidemic. …

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