Facebook's interactive COVID-19 map service to display symptoms county-by-county

Social media giant Facebook on Monday launched a new interactive map feature that will display reported county-by-county COVID-19 symptoms from users across the US.

The data which has been obtained via Facebook surveys in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University, will be updated throughout the outbreak, Engadget reported.

The company has also said that it plans to roll out symptom surveys globally in the coming days, in order to create similar symptom maps for other countries where Facebook operates.

In a post on Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg went on to say that the platform is uniquely suited to run these surveys because it serves a community of billions of people and can, therefore, carry out statistically accurate sampling.

Earlier, Apple and Google had both started work on a smartphone-based contract tracing system, while Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger recently launched Rt.live, which uses metrics to track the spread of COVID-19 in real-time.

( With inputs from ANI )