Set up analytics

[ewels]

The site code is designed to work with Simple Analytics: https://simpleanalytics.com/

This is normally a paid service, but the people behind it are involved in the coronastatus project and are offering free accounts for corona-related websites.

Importantly, Simple Analytics does not collect IP addresses or any other personally identifying information. They have a page on this here: https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/what-we-collect

If / when we get the go ahead and start scaling up ready to go live, it would be good to set this up and enable it.

[michaelmcmillan]

Heyo! How are you all doing? :)

Let me know and I'll add coronastatus.se (if that's the domain) to Simple Analytics. All our sites are public so that anyone can see the number of views etc. The pass code URLs are stripped of course.

[ewels]

Hi @michaelmcmillan, thanks for the help and again for your help! I've been meaning to update you all on our progress..

Maybe I can start with some context and background which I probably omitted in previous chats. We are all based at SciLifeLab in Sweden, which is a national hub for molecular biology research. There's a lot of stuff going on here at the moment, but generally SciLifeLab is being positioned as a coordinator of much of the Swedish research response. See https://www.scilifelab.se/covid-19

What we are keen to avoid is launching a coronastatus site and starting to collect survey responses only for a more official version to be launched a few days later. To get support we are thinking hard about the value and downstream use of the data, rather than the collection itself. Specifically:

• Can it be used to predict local outbreaks before they happen? (And warn healthcare)
• Will the data be of high enough quality / different enough from other sources to be of use for government response planning
• Can the data be used for research into disease progression / spreading

Key to all of these is a likely re-evaluation of the questions in consultation with healthcare. This will be difficult to change after any site does go live so needs to be spot on from the start. We think that to be really useful we would like to add more discriminating questions that can differentiate between flu and covid.

With this in mind, we are in the process of using an internal-only deployment of coronastatus as a demo to present first to SciLifeLab management (which has gone well) and now on to the national department for health (Folkhälsomyndigheten). The latter hasn't happened yet but we are well positioned for it and have appropriate contacts so hope to propose this soon.

This is the reason that we have not yet launched the site yet, although we could have done yesterday probably. I'm not sure if it's in yet, but we intend to PR back the translation work that we've done ASAP either way, for others to use. How the discussion goes here will strongly shape the next steps that we take. Potential outcomes could range massively at this point. For example, we could:

• Launching the site as-is very soon
• Launching with a re-skin so that it is branded as SciLifeLab / FHM (good for public trust)
• Killing the whole project because something else is being done elsewhere already 😢
• Reimplement more along the lines of helsenorge.no with BankID identification and SMS/email reminders etc.
• Phone apps, many more ideas.

You can see our internal meeting notes and planning documents here, which we will continue to use and update: https://scilifelab.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/CST/overview?homepageId=6750434

Shout if you have any feedback or thoughts, and I'll do my best to keep you updated with our progress.

Phil

[michaelmcmillan]

Thank you for writing such a detailed update, I'll share with the rest!

Of course we hope to offer as much as help as possible, so don't hesitate with reaching out if there's anything we can do. And please share any insight you gain with talking to your health services.

This is just anecdotal of course, but what I've learned so far is that getting something out quickly is often more important than nailing all the details (your mileage may vary of course, especially if you're an official research lab). Rapidly iterating and changing the site is a lot easier than trying to get everything right out of the gates.

[adriaandotcom]

@ewels if you need a Simple Analytics account, let me know and I can set it up for you.