Facebook rolls out county-by-county COVID-19 symptoms maps

Facebook is rolling out county-by-county maps showing where people have reported experiencing COVID-19 symptoms, something CEO Mark Zuckerberg is touting as an "important tool" in the crisis.

The social media platform's maps use data collected from a survey Facebook is asking users to take, which is conducted by the Carnegie Mellon University Delphi Research Center, NBC News reports. Facebook says it doesn't receive individual responses.

"Overall, since experiencing symptoms is a precursor to going to the hospital or becoming more seriously ill, these maps could be an important tool for governments and public health officials to make decisions on how to allocate scarce resources like ventilators and PPE, and eventually when it's safe to start re-opening society," Zuckerberg said.

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The survey asks users if they or anyone in their household has had symptoms associated with COVID-19 in the last 24 hours, and more than a million people responded within the first two weeks, Facebook says. A map shows an estimated percentage of people in a given county with COVID-19 symptoms in a week, though Facebook notes these aren't confirmed cases. Many people with the novel coronavirus also don't develop symptoms.

In an op-ed in The Washington Post on Monday, Zuckerberg writes that this is a way Facebook can "uniquely help" in the crisis and writes that the early results show promise, as the findings "correlate with publicly available data d cases, which suggests this data can help predict where the disease will spread." He adds, "The world has faced pandemics before, but this time we have a new superpower: the ability to gather and share data for good."

Facebook says it will update its COVID-19 map daily and this week will start conducting the surveys globally.