Instagram founders team up to launch a COVID-19 tracker Rt.live

Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger has reunited to launch a COVID-19 tracker called Rt.live. They have teamed up for the first time since leaving Facebook after the Instagram was acquired by Mark Zuckerberg’s company. Rt.live shows how fast the Novel Coronavirus is spreading in the United States.

The name ‘Rt’ is the unit that measures the average number of people who can get infected by an infectious person. The higher the number, the faster COVID-19 spreads among the population. A number below one shows the virus is receding and the infection rate is going down.

At present, the Rt.live shows data from the United States only. The site shows Georgia on top with a high Rt score of 1.5 while New York’s Rt score has come down to 0.54, according to TechCrunch.

The tracker’s idea came when Kreiger found out Kevin has been writing and publishing open-source data on how to calculate Rt on a daily basis. They teamed up to work and visualise the data so anyone can see how US states are doing at keeping the COVID-19 pandemic at bay.

The site shows charts and tables of infection data and assigns a Rt score to each state in the United States. The data is sourced from the COVID Tracking Project while Rt.live’s modeling system is available on GitHub. You can filter out states to see how a certain region of the country is doing as compared to the other, and also see the impact of states that have imposed stay-at-home orders versus states that have not.

The Instagram founders are also doing more individually to help US businesses stay afloat after stay-at-home orders in multiple states. The founders of the popular social networking app hopes the app serves as a dashboard for the authorities to decide when to ease lockdown orders. In India, COVID-19 cases officially touched 15,000 cases while the death toll cross 500.