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Widespread virus-specific testing for SARS-CoV-2 remains unavailable in most countries. Therefore, other methods, including symptom tracking, could be helpful in monitoring the epidemic. One approach, using a smartphone app, was recently developed by the Coronavirus Pandemic Epidemiology (COPE) consortium, a group of British and American researchers. It's called the COVID Symptom Tracker (https://covid.joinzoe.com/us).
The researchers developed a prediction model using app data from roughly 2.5 million users in the U.K. and 170,000 in the U.S. from March 24 to April 21, 2020. The model was based on the results of SARS-CoV-2 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests (completed in about 18,000 of the combined cohort) and four symptoms: loss of tas…