From the New York Times: Can Smart Thermometers Track the Spread...

• From the New York Times:

Can Smart Thermometers Track the Spread of the Coronavirus?
A company that makes internet-connected thermometers has followed the flu more closely than the C.D.C. can. Now the devices may be turning up cases of Covid-19.

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Kinsa Health has sold or given away more than a million smart thermometers to households.Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

By Donald G. McNeil Jr.

• March 18, 2020

A company that uses internet-connected thermometers to predict the spread of the flu says it is tracking the coronavirus in real time — something that had been impossible, given the lack of testing for the disease.

Kinsa Health has sold or given away more than a million smart thermometers to households in which two million people reside, and thus can record fevers almost as soon as consumers experience them.

For the last few years, Kinsa’s interactive maps have accurately predicted the spread of flu around the United States about two weeks before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s own surveillance tool, the weekly FluView tracker.

The thermometer data “acts as an early warning system for illness spreading,” said Inder Singh, the company’s founder. The C.D.C.’s system lags because it relies on weekly reports from hundreds of doctors’ offices and hospital emergency rooms about what symptoms they are seeing in patients.

Company scientists are uniquely positioned to identify unusual clusters of fever because they have years of data for expected flu cases in each ZIP code. A sudden spike that far exceeds estimates for flu for a given date may well indicate the coronavirus has arrived.

Medical experts were enthusiastic about the possibility that smart thermometers could be used to track the virus in the United States. Having millions of data points allows Kinsa to produce daily maps showing which counties are seeing spiking fevers.

The most common symptoms of infection with the coronavirus is a fever — about 90 percent of patients suffer from it, according to the World Health Organization.

“This is very, very exciting,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University. “This is 21st-century disease surveillance, and we’ve been rooted in the mid-20th century with something very labor intensive.”