NEW YORK: Harsh measures, including stay-at-home orders and restaurant closures, are contributing to rapid drops in the numbers of fevers - a signal symptom of most coronavirus infections - recorded in states across the country, according to intriguing new data produced by a medical technology firm.
Kinsa’s thermometers upload the user’s temperature readings to a centralised database; the data enables the company to track fevers across the United States. The company normally uses that data to track the spread of influenza. Since 2018, when it had more than 500,000 thermometers distributed, its predictions have routinely been two to three weeks ahead of those of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which gathers flu data on patient symptoms from doctors’ offices and hospitals.
By Friday morning, fevers in every county in the country were on a downward trend, depicted in four shades of blue on the map. “I’m very impressed by this,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a preventive medicine expert at Vanderbilt University. “It looks like a way to prove that social distancing works.”Explore: Interactive map of all the confirmed cases reported around the world
For example, in Manhattan, reports of fevers steadily rose during early March, despite a declaration of emergency on Mar 7 and an order on Mar 12 that public gatherings be restricted to less than 500 people. The state tracks hospitalisation rates, not fevers. So many patients were being admitted to New York City hospitals, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said, that until Mar 20, hospitalisation rates were doubling roughly every two days.
“People say these requirements - no restaurants, no nonessential workers - are burdensome,” he said. “And theyburdensome. But they are effective, and they are necessary. The evidence suggests that they have slowed our hospitalisations, and that isShown the Kinsa data, Dr. Howard Zucker, New York state’s health commissioner, called it “a great example of technology being able to show what we think we’re experiencing - and it’s consistent with our data.
Kinsa’s tracking of fevers in Miami-Dade County in Florida showed an even more pronounced trend, and the company had tried to raise the alarm. “Plus, we were getting pushback on social media,” she said. “People were saying, ‘The testing doesn’t show this, you know, is your data wrong?’ and ‘Could it be that you were just selling more thermometers in Florida?’”On Mar 12, a state of emergency had been declared, but according to Kinsa’s data, fevers were continuing to rise. Closing local schools on Mar 16 had little effect.
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