Health & Strategic Communication
Presenter(s): Miles Milosevish, Andy Anguiano
Advisor(s): Dr. Michael Fahy
We will be creating a twitter bot that will accept subscribers and direct message users with relevant case data in their county, including total and new confirmed cases, total and new deaths, total and new patients tested, and total and new projected actual cases (using methods described by Thomas Puey), in order to keep the public informed on the impact of COVID-19 in their area. There are many useful sites that describe the quantity of confirmed cases by county, but it may be more tiresome to check one of these sites at regular intervals to get updated. Just as well, there are no easy ways to discover the projected number of unconfirmed cases in your area aside for calculating it yourself. This number is currently much higher than the confirmed number of cases due to a combination of lack of available tests as well as asymptomatic people unaware of infection and the need to be tested. In order to do this, our twitter bot will pull data from the NY Times Coronavirus dataset to notify people of cases in the location specified in a user’s bio unless otherwise configured by the user. Users will subscribe by tweeting to the bot, along with optional location preferences and update frequency. User preferences can also be modified after subscribing by tweeting to the bot or by reaching out via direct message.