It’s not all play. Early on in the Covid-19 outbreak, Sweden stopped testing people for the virus. We just didn’t have the capacity to do it. The situation gave birth to the idea of creating a self diagnos service where people could calculate if they were likely to have the virus and offer advice on what to do if assumed positive.
I did a mockup in Sketch and a quick prototype in InVision that I ran by a few people in the medical field. One comment was that it needed to be backed by a big organisation, preferably governmental, to be trusted. Then I coded the main sections in PHP, which unfortunately is the only server side scripting language I’m proficient in but it made me move along quickly. I ran it by a few people once again.
I made the service multilingual by start so it potentially could be used in different countries but also support different languages within one country. It had been brought up on the news that immigrant groups had not taken part of important Covid-19 related information. With the addition of a simple CSS switch it should have been possible to offer Arabic as well as other right-to-left languages and foreign characters.
I used symptoms stated by WHO and the CDC as a source but the problem was that different countries used different symptoms and it kept on changing as the outbreak got classified as a pandemic. Suddenly pretty much any symptom could be Covid-19 which made the service a bit pointless.
It ended up just being a good exercise in quickly responding to an emergency by creating an IT-solution. This should preferably have been done by a team, not a single person.
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