Look Up Self-Reported Coronavirus Cases in Your Area with this Map

The Facebook map aims to help the government decide when, where, and how to reopen the United States Economy.

By Jacqueline Neber April 24, 2020

Facebook just created an interactive map that allows you to see self-reported coronavirus cases in every county of the United States using data Carnegie Mellon University collected from more than one million Facebook users in a voluntary survey. If you hover over your county on the map, you can see the percentage of people there who have reported symptoms. In Suffolk County, for example, 1.63 percent of people have reported coronavirus symptoms; in Queens, 2.31 percent of people have reported coronavirus symptoms.

Carnegie Mellon collected data voluntarily, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg pointed out that the map and its data is displayed in a way that protects people's privacy.

"Facebook is uniquely suited to run these surveys because we serve a global community of billions of people and can do statistically accurate sampling," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in an official blog post about the news, according to Time Out. "We do this in a privacy protective way where only the researchers at Carnegie Mellon see individual survey responses—and Facebook only sees aggregated data.”

The map will be updated daily based on continually carried-out surveys Facebook will conduct. The map’s goal, Time Out reports, is to “help the government decide when, where, and how to reopen the economy.” While the map focuses solely on the United States for now, Zuckerberg said global surveys will begin in the near future.