Operation Covid-19 will allow self-reporting of cases, to get ahead of official figures

The Canadian founder of a startup who caught Covid-19 from Justin Trudeau’s wife has launched an initiative to allow anyone to self-report their own case of the disease and publish the results, helping authorities to get ahead of the pandemic.

Operation Covid-19 will visualize both official and suspected cases of the Coronavirus in data lists and on a map, with the aim of saving lives and improving global public health systems. People will be able to self-report the case via an anonymous questionnaire.

The site aims to demonstrate how many official tests — compared to suspected COVID-19 cases — there are.

“The more people who can contribute their COVID-19 experiences, we can turn the table on this pandemic and build more intelligence to save lives,” said co-founder Jillian Kowalchuk.

Kowalchuk is cofounder of “street-smart” safety app Safe & The City, but fell ill with COVID-19 symptoms after meeting the Prime Minister of Canada’s wife, Sophie Trudeau — who later tested positive for the disease — on March 5th at Canada House in London, as she Instagrammed.

She was later dismayed to learn she was refused a test for COVID-19 in a UK hospital and was instead told to go home and self-isolate, making her concerned about the lack of testing and public awareness of the scale of the problem.

“First-hand experiences like this are becoming more common throughout the world as more are refused testing, leaving the majority of COVID-19 cases unknown, under-estimating the severity of the problem, limiting preventative measures and resource mobilization into other needed public health monitoring systems,” she told TechCrunch.

The initiative will collect insights from people who have contracted COVID-19 to provide back to the medical and public health authorities.

In doing so it will create a map visualization of both official and self-reported COVID-19 cases, recovered and deaths to support best practices globally, including more testing.

To contribute software development to the project you can access its Github here or volunteer by emailing operationcovid19@gmail.com or joining the Facebook group.