Former OICR intern leads the development of a COVID-tracking site used by more than 400,000 people in Canada to date

Flatten is quickly becoming a go-to source of information about how COVID-19 is spreading across Canada.

In less than a month, more than 400,000 people have submitted data on their symptoms, travel history, age and medical conditions, making Flatten the country’s leading crowdsourced COVID data repository.

Behind the project is a team of first- and second-year university students who are determined to help.

“We just wanted to put our technical skills to good use during this time,” says Vice President of Flatten, Yifei Zhang, in a University of Waterloo story. “It’s been great working together with everybody trying to build a platform that will be useful for Canadians across the country.”

As a web-based, data-gathering platform, Flatten provides a real-time heat map of self-reported confirmed and potential COVID-19 cases across the country. The platform helps increase awareness and flatten the curve of COVID-19 cases.

Over the last four weeks, Flatten has rapidly evolved from an idea into an incorporated non-profit organization, with support from advisors such as Dr. Geoffrey Hinton and sponsors such as Google Cloud, the Vector Institute and CIFAR.

The team behind Flatten has established collaborations with health authorities across Canada, such as in Montreal, and plans to work with other municipal governments and provinces..

“We work with leading advisors and collaborators to make sure we’re surveying the right questions and providing the right information for Canadians today to help flatten the curve,” says Zhang.

Zhang, who is completing his second year as a software engineering student at the University of Waterloo and leads Flatten’s website development, attributes his website development knowledge to his internship with OICR’s WebDev team.

“My time at OICR reinforced my interest in working in health and biology, giving me the motivation and drive to pursue this initiative,” says Zhang. “At OICR, I gained experience working with a high volume of data using robust techniques and I was able to bring that knowledge into developing Flatten.ca. A lot of the fundamentals we used to build this site came from best practices that I learned from my term at OICR.”

Learn more at flatten.ca.