When a person has a viral infection that impacts the lungs, the body’s immune system mounts a response. For the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, the four common elements are:
Increase in temperature
Decrease in the amount of oxygen in the blood (oxygen saturation)
Increase is resting heart rate
Increase in the rate of breathing (respiratory rate)
Studies have have shown that many people infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus do not develop a significant fever, so reliance on temperature checks as the only measure to screen for coronavirus infection is fraught with inaccuracies: many people who are infected and infectious to others may not be correctly identified.
COVIDcloud lets users improve their ability to see an infection by tracking all four of these factors.
The U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, has released guidance on how to consider factors such as these in deciding whether a person might be infected. COVIDcloud incorporates this scientific guidance in determining whether a factor departs from the healthy range: we call these divergent factors. A person with nothing out of the healthy range has zero divergent factors in this way of thinking; a person with just an elevated resting heart rate would have one factor, and so on. People who are more ill have more factors that are out of the healthy ranges.
The Apple Watch can get most of this information without the wearer having to do anything, making it simple and easy to keep track of this information.
COVIDcloud