Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

Hi, HN: We saw a need for a site that people could find Covid-19 test locations, so a group of us developers and medical professionals decided to build one. Here's the Ask HN that started the ball rolling a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22577979

Over the last week DataDrivenMD and I were able to pull together 15 developers to get this out. The speed that we were able to cobble together a team that can work smoothly, 100% remotely from all different organizations has been amazing. The crisis action team for the state of CA has reached out to see if they can collaborate with us, and we’re doing our best to understand how to work with state and local governments going forward.

Thanks to the fantastic volunteers, we have we were able to refactor early, away from the junk front end I built, to something that we can actually scale on the front and back end. We’re currently struggling with how to scale our collection and updating of test locations as they spring up, and we hope to build an application to allow providers to submit their locations on their own. Right now that whole process is manual, based on manually scraping/validating locations that are publicly stating they are doing testing. If infrastructure existed to identify places that are testing, we would be using it, but it doesn’t as far as we know, so we’re building the communication infrastructure for these test sites as it starts forming.

We’re US only right now but if we can get to a scalable way to collect test location data we can be worldwide.

This is a 100% volunteer effort explicitly for public good. We will not monetize the site, sell access to any resources we have, or in any way monetarily or personally benefit from this project, we have no plans to continue as a group any longer than we need to. No single organization is sponsoring this, and we have credits from GCP and AWS to run our infrastructure so Jorge and I don't go broke!

Please help us: Post in this thread any feedback, suggestions for scaling how we source and verify testing location data (manual currently), or anything you think useful! We’ll be monitoring the thread.

Our code is 100% FOSS: https://github.com/codersagainstcovidorg/covid19testing-map. We're available at @findcovidtest on twitter and contact@codersagainstcovid.org. Thanks!

Great to see initiatives like this. However, everyone who can should be using a teledoc and getting instructions before visiting a testing site. Otherwise you're putting healthcare providers and patients in danger (a former colleague drove to multiple stations to try to get tested and he interacted with a bunch of HCPs).

Do you mind making it clear in the tool that someone viewing the site should first contact a teledoc?

I understand that this is how things are now.

But shouldn't an effort be made to make things easier and safer? Imagine a drive-through location with the web address of an intake app over entrance. You do intake with the app in the parking lot and then get cleared to go through. Everything automate and nearly free of human contact.

Apparently not, unfortunately. Each person who gets tested uses up masks, gloves, and other protection equipment that is in short supply. If you think you might have the virus, quarantine yourself or go to a hospital if you need emergency care. Getting tested if you’re healthy won’t change the outcome.

Many jurisdictions (including mine in Calgary) are telling people NOT to visit hospitals. We’re supposed to do the health authority’s online self-assessment and call our local healthcare number to get instructions.

Uh, again,

Sure, we have a shortage. But mask and other equipment production is going to be ramped up shortly. Testing and is going to be the second part of any virus suppression effort.

And yeah, currently, we got nothing. Everyone quarantine, the sick-enough go to the soon-to-be overwhelmed hospitals. But we have to look plausible measures once we have resources, right?

You overestimate how tech savvy the common population is and how much hand holding is actually required to achieve this drive through testing efficiency.

People would get in line with their car to ask the attendant questions or for IT app support. There are language, accessibility/disability, cultural, etc. barriers (to name a few).

"We saw a need for a site that people could find Covid-19 test locations"

I'm curious what data/feedback you used to conclude this need existed. I haven't seen any news articles that say the bottleneck is knowledge of locations. As many others have pointed out, the issue is with healthcare staff safety, test supplies, etc.

If you end up looking for a pivot, perhaps you could convert this into a map of locations where people could safely donate their excess supplies of masks, etc that they're holding onto unnecessarily. That could contribute to the problem of lack of supplies for healthcare workers.

thanks.

here is a drive happening in Austin, Texas:

https://www.kxan.com/news/coronavirus/masks-gloves-and-therm...

Nice initiative! Testing seems key to getting control of spread, so anything that can make it easier to get people tested is key. I wonder if there's enough capacity among the testing facilities to signal when they are out of capacity, or severely backlogged on tests, to avoid potentially affected people arriving needlessly?

One technical issue though - I'm seeing a white (blank) page when visiting in Firefox, though it seems to load fine in Chrome.

2 errors in the JS console, in case they help:

TypeError: "navigator.geolocation is undefined" at react-dom.production.min.js:196:194

TypeError: navigator.geolocation is undefined at App.tsx:121:4

Thanks! Logged

> so anything that can make it easier to get people tested is key

Unfortunately not necessarily. We are past testing in some areas, and people seeking testing is putting strain on overloaded resources.

See for example:

“Not every single person in the U.S. needs to get tested,” said Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “When you go in and get tested, you are consuming personal protective equipment, masks and gowns — those are high priority for the health care workers who are taking care of people who have coronavirus disease.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/03/21/coronavirus...

[edit: tldr; There is no such thing as "getting tested". Stop looking for reassurance over a cough and fever; YOU WILL NOT BE TESTED FOR MILD SYMPTOMS; you're wasting very limited and precious healthcare resources which people who are potentially dying from severe symptoms need access to. Just. Stay. Home! /rant]

Woah man, your tone is a bit over the top here. People may not know what's going on.

I understand you're upset, it's a very upsetting situation. But venting to HN won't really help the things that are upsetting to you.

It's more effective I think to explain the situation clearly and help other on this site understand why mass testing is not a good idea in parts of the US.

EDIT: thanks the edit is much more effective!

I get what you are saying but it is getting really boring explaining basic facts again and again and again. The whole 'my opinion is valuable and the world is a debate' is great in good times. These are bad times and lots of people really do need to stop talking and start listening.

EDIT I hope the downvoters and their families make it through the epidemic alive.

Feedback on the website: it's running quite slow for me on Chromium under Linux, especially if there are a lot of locations (for example, unchecking "exclude public health agencies" makes the site very unresponsive). Also, "exclude local public health agencies" is confusing; I'd expect selecting it to show only those that aren't local public health agencies, but it seems to have the opposite effect. Finally, if I click on one of the locations, what I assume to be X-marks are displayed as just rectangles (I guess a missing Unicode symbol in the font on my machine).

Thanks again for making this!

Thanks for the feedback. The map is definitely not optimized right now and it's on the fix list

Pretty neat seeing which states have the most testing locations. I'm pretty sure Houston has a few testing locations, but nothing is showing up on the map for me currently.

Just some feedback, this runs pretty slowly for me on my laptop. Is the full screen map necessary? Might be nice to have a Google Maps feel where it has the list on the side of the locations currently in view

We need better data sources so if you can help us find them send a note about the locations you know about to:

contact@codersagainstcovid.org

Echoing what was said about running slowly. On mobile Chrome it is slow but usable. On mobile Firefox it is too slow/janky to use. I appreciate the effort that has gone into this, but I do think it would be good to have an alternative non-map interface without the heavy js. Or figure out how to improve the performance, though that might require swapping out mapbox entirely.

Yes - Houston data will be coming soon. It took extra effort to figure out how testing was being coordinated among the TMC hospitals and their community-based partners. Stay tuned for updates - we are pushing data out regularly from this point forward.

Hi Andrew,

I hope you don't mind, I saw this today and was inspired to build this:

https://tests.covid42.com

I'm planning to extend it with search functionality & an admin interface to help scale the sourcing of new data & validating it at scale.

Would you like to work on this together?

Thanks for doing this. Not all heroes wear capes.

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