Students leverage big data to track the spread of COVID-19 – Faculty of Engineering

Students leverage big data to track the spread of COVID-19

FLATTEN.ca is a real-time heat map of potential and confirmed COVID-19 cases in your neighbourhood.

Maanav Dalal portrait
By TRACY HUYNH

Maanav Dalal, a second year software engineering student at McMaster, is part of a team of more than 25 students who are working on FLATTEN.ca, a free online platform that helps to track the spread of COVID-19.

FLATTEN.ca is a real-time heat map of potential and confirmed COVID-19 cases in your neighbourhood.  

Website visitors are asked to fill out a form assessing their symptoms and risk of infection. There are over 200,000 responses so far.

The confirmed cases displayed on the heat map are based on a COVID-19 Canada Open Data Working Group and potential cases are from the data collected in the form as well as the number of individuals that are especially vulnerable to COVID-19 in each municipality.  

Dalal is one of many volunteer students from universities across the country working on the project. Other universities include the University of Toronto, University of Waterloo, Ryerson University, and the University of New Brunswick. 

You can read more about the project in The Globe and Mail.