09/22/2020

Instagram's Founders Explain Their COVID-charting Obsession

They built rt.live, which state officials can use to plan reopenings

If you are the cofounders of Instagram, what do you do as your big second act after leaving Facebook? Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger say they aren’t yet sure, but in the interim, they have been spurred to action by our desperate need for clear information during the novel coronavirus crisis. It’s called rt.live, a website that tracks the velocity of COVID’s spread. (“Rt” refers to how many people a single sick individual will infect over time.) They have used machine learning and data science to calculate the figure, taking into account factors such as how testing might affect the results.

Unlike the raw numbers of states’ caseloads, Rt is a quick way to gauge the direction of the crisis, yielding at a glance the relative impact of tactics such as sheltering to suppress the spread and relaxing restrictions for economic or mental-health purposes. (The letter R derives from “reproduction.”) Systrom and Krieger say that over a million people have accessed the site, including public officials who have used it to plan their strategies.

The Instagram cofounders are still close friends, and both of them now live, as many of us do, with a measure of caution, awaiting a normalcy that they suspect will not come soon. Though they did not express an eagerness to talk about Facebook, their public pronouncements about their former employer have been diplomatic. But they were happy to share the origins of rt.live and what they hope they’ve accomplished by the project. The interview was conducted remotely (duh) and is edited for length and clarity. It was recorded before a report that Systrom had been contacted about taking the job as CEO of TikTok—though he did take a question about that Chinese social network.

Please select this link to read the complete article from WIRED.