New Facebook COVID-19 Map Shows Number of Symptoms in New York

A new COVID-19 map shows the number of reported COVID-19 symptoms by Facebook users across the country.

Facebook's interactive map shows how many people reported COVID-19 symptoms. The map takes data from a survey of over one million Facebook users, according to Facebook.

"Facebook is uniquely suited to run these surveys because we serve a global community of billions of people and can do statistically accurate sampling," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday in a statement. "We do this in a privacy-protective way where only the researchers at Carnegie Mellon see individual survey responses — and Facebook only sees aggregated data."

The survey conducted by Carnegie Mellon University Delphi Research Center asked people to self-report COVID-19 or flu symptoms that they or anyone in their home experienced in the last 24 hours.

Zuckerberg says it's critical for local governments and public health officials to understand how the repository illness is spreading to help make decisions on when to reopen.

"Researchers believe these symptom survey maps can be an important tool in making these decisions," Zuckerberg said. "The next step is to start running these surveys globally this week. This will allow us to expand the symptom maps to provide county-by-county data across almost every country in the world where Facebook operates."

CLICK HERE to explore the map.