Facebook has created a map that tracks how many people per county have reported having symptoms of the coronavirus via a survey the company is running with Carnegie Mellon University researchers.
“Understanding how COVID-19 is spreading is critical for local governments and public health officials as they allocate scarce resources like ventilators and PPE, and eventually to decide when it is safe to start re-opening different places,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a statement. “Researchers believe these symptom survey maps can be an important tool in making these decisions.”
The map shows what percentage of people living in each county in the U.S. has reported symptoms of the virus, with the counties colored red and the shade getting lighter or darker depending on how many report symptoms.
“Facebook is uniquely suited to run these surveys because we serve a global community of billions of people and can do statistically accurate sampling,” Zuckerberg continued. “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 company hopes to expand the surveys globally by the end of this week, according to the post, in every country where Facebook is available.
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.