With more than 6,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 registered in the US, the government is thinking about new ways to control the outbreak.
To that end, the White House is exploring solutions that help people maintain a safe distance from each other — by teaming up with tech companies to monitor your location data.
A report by the Washington Post notes that the government is already talking with experts at Google, Facebook, and other tech giants to possibly use anonymized location data, so that health specialists can track the outbreak more efficiently.
The project is in the early stage, and the task force assigned to it discussed various ideas ranging from telemedicine to disease mapping at a meeting on Sunday. Josh Mendelsohn, the managing partner at Hangar, a venture capital firm, who helped set up the committee, said it’ll present its recommendations to the government in the coming days.
US-based tech companies have already started multiple efforts to combat COVID-19.
Earlier this week, verily, an Alphabet subsidiary, released a portal that will guide people through the testing process in California. While Mircosoft released its coronavirus tracker dashboard on the same day, Google building a website that collates information about the disease, including symptoms and risks.
Plus, all these companies are joining forces to remove misinformation from their platforms.