Over 750K downloads in 24 hours

An app in the U.K. rose in extreme popularity this week, going viral with over 750,000 downloads since it launched on Tuesday. The app, called the C-19 COVID Symptom Tracker, asks people to self-report coronavirus symptoms, logging the date, time and location. In turn, this helps medical professionals identify potential outbreak hotspots. As of yesterday, over 1 million people had actively reported their status.

The app, which was developed by a startup called Zoe and researchers at Kings College Hospital in London, is now the third most popular app overall in the UK on the Apple App Store. The team behind the app also plans to bring the project to the U.S., working with researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and Stanford to do so.

Overall, the hope is that crowdsourced information from the app could be useful to medical professionals as they plan their responses to outbreak clusters. Apple, Google and Amazon also built a website (in six days) to do the same thing. 👈

Over the past several weeks, we’ve seen over 60 products launch in efforts to spread awareness and relief around COVID-19, along with many more products related to remote working, at-home entertainment, and self-care.

Today alone, we saw a portal of online classes from chefs, a community hub from Facebook that offers authoritative information on the outbreak, a Slack app to send signed birthday cards remotely, a care package service for WFH employees, an app to help save local bookstores, and a digital coach to cope with anxiety. 🙌

"I share my journey with therapy, starting with when my husband and I got separated and went to couple's therapy, with anyone — my teammates, customers, reporters or investor." - Roni Frank, co-founder of Talkspace. 

In our latest Maker Story, we spoke with Roni about how she "walks the walk" when it comes to mental health. 👏