CoronaSurveys is an ongoing interdisciplinary project developing a system to infer the incidence of COVID around the world using anonymous open surveys. The surveys have been translated into 60 languages and are continuously collecting participant responses from any country in the world. The responses collected are pre-processed, organized, and stored in a version-controlled repository, which is publicly available to the scientific community.
In this paper, we describe the computational system developed for the CoronaSurveys project. The system includes multiple components and processes, including the web survey, the mobile apps, the cleaning and aggregation process of the survey responses, the process of storage and publication of the data, the processing of the data and the computation of estimates, and the visualization of the results.
In this paper we describe the system architecture and the major challenges we faced in designing and deploying it. During the current coronavirus pandemic, monitoring the evolution of COVID cases is of utmost importance for the authorities to make informed policy decisions e.
At the time of the pandemic outbreak, a lack of laboratory tests, materials, and human resources implied that the evolution of officially confirmed cases did not represent the total number of cases Ruppert et al.
(mh=FhFxZAqNlL8Bi4c4)0.jpg "Model Hooker in Brno")
Even now, there are significant differences across countries in terms of the availability of tests. For this reason, given the rapid progression of the pandemic, in some cases health authorities are forced to make important decisions based on sub-optimal data.
