Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger launched a website on Sunday, 20 April, that helps track the rate of COVID-19 infections in the United States of America.
The website, RT.live, tracks Rt, which represents the effective reproduction rate for each state in the US. This gives an estimate of the number of people who can catch the virus by a single infected person.
Rt values over 1.0 mean we should expect more cases in that area, values under 1.0 mean we should expect fewer.
The website says that it gets the latest data from The COVID Tracking Project, which is a volunteer organisation that collects data from trustworthy sources and visualises it.
We’re trying to take what is a complex topic and boil it down to a simple number that anyone can view from their home.Kevin Systrom to Bloomberg
Bloomberg also reported that Systrom believes it’s more useful to look at the infection rate from a local angle, especially when the problem is at a global stage.
Systrom and Krieger worked together for Instagram up till 2018 when the duo quit Facebook in September 2018.
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