Kinsa Health thermometers indicate fewer fevers across US due to isolation of 248 M people: NYT (a few words on that subject)

(image courtesy of pixabay.com and TheDigitalArtist)

A newish company that produces digital thermometers hooked up to the web, Kinsa Health, first showed a national map of fever levels on March 22 on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC at 9PM EDT (at least that’s where I first saw it) that indicated the obvious hot spots in NYC and Washington state, as well as a much hotter area in southern Florida that still has not been publicized widely.

Now, the NYT states that data from New York State and Washington State confirm that there have been reductions in rates of new infections.  The story in the New York Times also states that the map was first shown on March 22.

According to the NYT story, there are more than a million of the Kinsa thermometers in circulation (I heard elsewhere that there were eight million, but don’t quote me) and there have been up to 162,000 daily temperature readings uploaded to the web.  This “web” of thermometers has accurately predicted, two to three weeks ahead of time, influenza outbreaks since 2018.  That was when they only had half a million thermometers distributed.

This news, along with the documented drop in new infections in Italy, makes me cautiously optimistic that isolation measures are going to be effective at “flattening the curve”.