This platform was created two years ago and has worked to improve emergency responses.
Data for Good, is a Facebook platform that was created to track natural disaster data and statistics, prevent diseases through vaccination campaigns, and more recently it provides COVID-19 studies through prevention maps, volunteer programs and mobility data in countries in times of social distancing.
The platform offers free datasets for data analysis and research for study centers and/or health organizations. Among the tools are population density maps, ideal for planning vaccination campaigns, or more specific for COVID-19 maps that measure the range of mobility of populations to know how the population has responded to social distancing measures.
In addition to datasets, the platform has tools for nonprofits, governments, and researchers. One of these tools is the symptom map, used by health authorities, to determine which specific areas should be sent to the greatest medical resources, also to determine the lifting of lockdown measures or the opposite. Moreover, this type of data is also useful for researchers, because, thanks to these, we can know how the virus behaves in specific places.
This data is obtained directly from the Facebook app, in which users can decide whether or not to take the survey for monitoring and tracking possible COVID-19 cases, for the analysis of the data that the surveys produce, Facebook formed an alliance with Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland.
Another useful tool for tracking and monitoring symptoms in the population is the Social Connectedness Index, which through Crowd Tangle, displays mentions of COVID-19 on the Instagram and Facebook media accounts of each country, mentions by Facebook users and mentions by political accounts on Instagram and Facebook.
