Instagram Founder Makes COVID-19 Tracking Site Claimed To Be More Accurate

Illustration (Pixabay)

JAKARTA - Participating in the fight against the corona virus pandemic or COVID-19, the founder of Instagram launched a website that provides information directly on which countries are infected with the virus in the United States (US).

Named RT.Live, the site uses a statistic called the effective reproduction rate, which, on average, tracks the number of people catching the virus from one infected person.

"We're trying to take a complex topic and boil it down to a simple number that anyone can see from their home," said co-founder and former CEO of Instagram, Kevin Systrom, as quoted by the South China Morning Post, Sunday, April 19.

The RT.Live website gets data from The Covid Tracking Project. The project is a volunteer initiative that collects data from reliable sources, including public health authorities. They report detailed country-by-country data on the number of COVID-19 tests given, the number of positive or negative patients, the number of hospitalizations, and the number of deaths.

Systrom added that it is more useful to see the level of infection from a local angle, because the COVID-19 pandemic is global in nature. He hopes the RT.Live website can also help residents understand the economic impact of this pandemic.

"That's why this dashboard is so important, because it gives you first-hand insight into the effects of the choices we all make," said Systrom.

Previously, Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram in 2012 in a deal worth about $ 730 million in cash and stock. In fact, initially Instagram only had 13 employees.

However, Systrom and Mike Krieger, the founders of Instagram, left Facebook at the end of 2018 after falling out with CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The establishment of the RT.Live website makes one wonder that the two founders did not even have a background in health and epidemiology education.

Apart from RT.Live, you can also do tracking globally and locally about the spread of COVID-19 through the following website.

1. corona.jakarta.go.id2. pikobar.jabarprov.go.id3. bing.com/covid4. experience.arcgis.com 5. cdc.gov6. nextstrain.org7. covid19.go.id