Google Maps, the website and mapping application of the US giant Google, will be able to reveal on the maps, consulted by users, the areas of infection of COVID-19.
“When opening Google Maps, click on the tab on the right under ‘covid-19 information’ and you can see the rate per 100,000 inhabitants of COVID-19 cases on an average of seven days in the map area you are viewing,” it can be read today in a Google blog post.
On the map of a neighborhood or destination that you visit, the Internet user can also see if the cases tend to increase. A color code will identify the density of cases ranging from gray (less than one case), to red (between 30 to 40 cases), then dark red (more than 40 cases per 10,000 inhabitants), with intermediate values in yellow and orange.
Google, which claims to be able to offer this cartographic information in 122 countries, indicates that it collects the information across the United States, particularly from Johns Hopkins University, which is the benchmark for counting infection cases, while also extracting information from The New York Times and Wikipedia.
The data will also be based on updating the health situation established by the World Health Organization (WHO), public authorities and local institutions.
“More than a billion people turn to Google Maps for essential information on how to get from place to place, especially during the pandemic, when health concerns are at the forefront,” wrote Sujoy Banerjee, product director at Google Maps.
“So this week we are going to introduce a new feature for Maps, a tool that reveals vital information about COVID-19 cases in an area, so that they can make informed decisions about where they want to go and what to do,” added the official.
The COVID-19 pandemic has already claimed at least 978,448 deaths and nearly 32 million cases of infection worldwide, according to a report by the French agency AFP.
In Portugal, 1,931 people died from 71,156 confirmed cases of infection, according to the most recent bulletin from the Directorate-General for Health.
The disease is transmitted by a new coronavirus detected in late December in Wuhan, a city in central China.
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