You’ll soon be adding one more thing to your checklist when venturing out of the house. First grab your mask and hand sanitizer, then check Google Maps on your smartphone.
The navigation app is adding information on the prevalence of COVID-19 in certain areas – pulling data from the pandemic dashboard maintained by Johns Hopkins University, The New York Times and Wikipedia – to its publicly available maps. By toggling on the “COVID” layer in the app, users will be able to see the seven-day average number of confirmed cases in each area per 100,000 people.
In this new feature, available on both Android and iOS, areas of the map will be color-coded based on COVID case rate, and labeled to indicate if the number of cases are going up or down in each location.
The addition, according to a Google Maps project manager, is designed to help users “make more informed decisions about where to go and what to do.”
Understanding what locations might be experiencing greater infection rates can help people avoid travel there and possible infection, which is especially important since the nation has still not developed “herd immunity” to COVID-19, according to Dr. Ajay Kumar, chief clinical officer at Hartford HealthCare. This phenomenon describes the effect of having a large percentage of a population become immune to a threatening infection either by recovering from being infected or by getting vaccinated.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended that all people monitor COVID-19 spread in their area when deciding the risk of various social activities and the prevalence in other areas when they are making travel or holiday plans.
