By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

In the face of Covid-19, health tech startup Evidation Health is leveraging their relationships with the 4-million people on their Achievement app, the “always on” stream of behavioral data these folks bring to the table via wearables, sensors, and surveys, and everything they’ve learned from years of studying and modeling flu outbreaks to examine the Covid-19 virus in the context of people’s everyday lives.

Evidation’s CEO, Deb Kilpatrick, and Sr. Data Scientist, Ernesto Ramirez, stop by to talk about their company’s efforts for large-scale, frequent symptom surveillance of Covid-19 to add new insights to our understanding of the pandemic and, possibly, even help with making predictions about its spread and severity.

The company is already publishing some of its findings in a weekly report called “Covid-19 Pulse” that is already gleaning insights from a 150,000+ person cohort asked to weigh-in specifically on what they’re doing and how their lives are changing as a result of the pandemic. What’s unique in Evidation’s spin is that they’re adding that critical data from “daily life” that is more or less missed by just looking at the data reported from those who’ve entered the hospital.

“Those folks that are presenting into the medical system — that’s not the full picture of what’s going on,” says Ramirez. “What we need to do is better understand, really, what’s going on at the community level to understand community spread, to understand surveillance efforts, to understand mitigation efforts that may or may not be having impact around the spread of Covid-19.”