Personalizing symptom monitoring and contact tracing efforts through a COVID-19 web-app

BACKGROUND: The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has sparked attention in many countries, especially those that have experienced a steep spike in the number of identified cases. The continued spread of the coronavirus suggests that this situation may be here to stay for a while. Contact tracing is a time-consuming and resource-intensive process, which taps on the already lean healthcare resource in certain countries. Furthermore, the massive infodemic on COVID-19 on the Internet has also resulted in widespread circulation of misinformation online. This outbreak has evoked irrational fear and anxiety from the public, which has resulted in destabilizing of societal norms, such as panic buying and hoarding of daily necessities, and can potentially pose serious health risks to the public. The aim of this paper is to present a COVID-19 Symptom Monitoring and Contact Tracking Record (CoV-SCR) web-app as a bottom-up, proactive approach to supplement the current management strategies for COVID-19. MAIN TEXT: The CoV-SCR web-app (http://bit.ly/covscrapp) enables individuals to keep a personal record of their close contacts and monitor their symptoms on a daily basis, so that they can provide relevant and accurate details when they see the doctor and during the contact tracing process. Individuals can record their temperature and rate their symptoms on a 5-point severity scale, as well as record details of their travel and contact history for the last 14 days. The recorded information will be sent to their e-mail address for potential symptom monitoring and contact tracing purposes. In addition, this web-app consolidates evidence-based information on the coronavirus from credible sources, such as the World Health Organization, countries’ health authorities, and PubMed literature. CONCLUSIONS: A COVID-19 Symptom Monitoring and Contact Tracking web-app has been developed to facilitate contact tracing efforts through public engagement. This app serves an additional purpose of providing information about COVID-19 from reliable resources.