At this difficult time when people are locked down in their homes to stop the spread of the COVID-19, misinformation another dangerous thing alongside the virus itself. Misinformation can create unnecessary fear among people in this very difficult time. That’s the World Health Organization or WHO has come up with an app called WHO COVID-19 to battle the misinformation.
The app collects location information to provide accurate information and warnings specific to their location. The app also offers a feature called Self-Triage which could help users diagnose whether their symptoms match those of COVID-19. The app will give users health recommendations from the experts at the World Health Organization. In the WHO COVID-19 app, you can also find the latest information on the number of global cases and related deaths reported to the World Health Organization. More importantly, the app also includes a prominent link to donate to the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund for WHO.
The originally set to publish under the name of “WHO MyHealth” is developed by a team of volunteer experts that have formed the “WHO COVID App Collective.” The team consists of engineers from Google, Microsoft and WHO advisors and ambassadors as well. It is an open-source app and the code is available in GitHub. It was first built with Ionic React later they move to Google’s futter for cross-platform development for both Android and iOS.
As it collects location data there is privacy concern but in their Privacy Policy they stated that “We don’t collect email, phone numbers, or fine-grained locations”. Right now the early access version is only available for the Android users in Play Store. But we can hope that they will release the stable version on both Android and iOS at the same as it is built on the cross-platform language.