With more than 790,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States, tech companies have been eager to help. The two founders of Instagram recently developed a website that visualises the average number of COVID-19 infections in real time, giving people a state-by-state view of how the disease is spreading.
On April 10, 2012, Instagram, a startup with just 13 employees, was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion, at the time Facebook’s largest acquisition ever.
Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the founders of Instagram, were 28 and 25 respectively at the time. This became a myth that inspired more entrepreneurs at the time.
They left Facebook in 2018 amid internal conflicts.
Now, two years after leaving Facebook, the Instagram founders are teaming up again to create a new product, this time for COVID-19 in the US.
Co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger recently launched a new website, Rt.Live, which uses statistical methods to measure how fast the virus is spreading, rather than just raw COVID-19 data like a typical statistical site.
Address:
rt.live/
“We started RT.Live because we believe Rt, the basic number of infections, is one of the best ways to understand how COVID-19 spreads.” Says founder Krieger.
Rt.live was created to monitor the spread of the disease
Rt, which the site tracks, is an epidemiological benchmark that measures the average number of people infected with an infectious disease who spread it to other people.
A reading of Rt above 1 indicates that COVID-19 is spreading faster among people, while a reading below 1 indicates that the virus is subsiding.
Rt. Live, developed by Kevin and Mike, visually displays THE value of Rt to show that the stay-at-home policy can effectively reduce the transmission rate of the virus and persuade people to stay indoors.
South Dakota has an Rt of 2.1, the highest in the country
Through the site, users are able to filter by region, so you can see that western states are doing a better job of containing COVID-19 than southern states, and that more and more states are getting better. States that did not have stay-at-home orders, on average, did not fare well.
Let me give you a concrete example. In New York State, due to an aggressive social distancing order, Rt has dropped to 0.54, according to Rt.live.
Rt value showed no downward trend
The site is based on data from the COVID-19 Tracking project, and Kevin has uploaded rt. Live’s modeling system to GitHub.
GitHub address: https://github.com/k-sys/covid-19
In addition, the tool can be used as a reference for people returning to work in various states, and can be used as a response strategy as the situation changes.
Instagram founder, medical crossover?
Many people were also surprised by the news: for the photo app giant to build a medical statistics website, seems a bit of a crossover?
But in fact, the two are not as unrelated as they seem.
Kevin has been working on virality for a long time, as it’s one of the things he does to help Instagram grow rapidly.
“Every day, Kevin studies how to use open source data to compute Rt, and publishes his analysis notes,” Krieger said.
They want to visualize the data so anyone can see how well their state is doing in containing the spread of the virus.
“As states decide whether and how to open up, they’re going to have to carefully manage their infection rates, and we hope tools like RT.Live can help with that,” Krieger said.
On March 19, Krieger began publishing his own statistical model to track coronavirus infections and deaths. “Kevin and I had been talking about ways to collaborate, and my first job was doing data visualization/analytics at Meebo,” Krieger says.
While Kevin crunched the numbers, Krieger built the site, a front-end and back-end role they had previously played at Instagram.
They’ve worked wonders before, but what about this collaboration?
It was acquired and continued to operate until it left in 2018
Kevin and Mike’s success is no accident. Excellent academic background, strong self-learning ability, and sensitive capture of user preferences are all factors contributing to the success of Instagram.
Kevin Systrom comes from a good family and loves computer games. He received his BACHELOR’s degree in management Science and Engineering from Stanford University in 2002.
Mike Krieger moved from Sao Paulo, Brazil, to California in 2004 to attend Stanford University.
Kevin has never received formal programming education, but he built some websites by himself during his college years. He learned programming by himself at night.
After graduation, Kevin created Burbn, an HTML5-based check-in app, and invited Krieger, whom he had known since college, to join him. Together, they decided to turn Burbn into a free app for sharing filtered photos.
They created the first version of Instagram in just eight weeks. Since then, Instagram has rocketed to the top of the app store charts, surpassing the founders’ expectations. “We knew it was going to work, but we didn’t know it was going to work like this.”
Suddenly, nearly a decade after Instagram’s debut, the two startup partners are teaming up again.
Krieger seems happy about the collaboration: “It was great to be working together again — we were able to turn the idea into a product in a matter of days because of the memories and chemistry we share.”
The two gods may not be hoping to create a “viral” product like Instagram, but rather that RT. Live will, to some extent, prevent the spread of the real virus and end the epidemic as soon as possible.
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