Kinsa Health, a San Francisco-based company that has sold or given away thousands of smart thermometers to households in Florida, has the power to track in real-time people’s fevers as soon as they test for them. The thermometer data serves as an early warning of illness, and the company has used it to track the spread of the flu in Florida and around the country for six years.
As the novel coronavirus has spread, Kinsa Health has tracked a “strong correlation” between confirmed COVID-19 cases and illness that cannot be explained or attributed to seasonal flu across Florida, potentially indicating the spread of the virus is faster than the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was reporting it, said Patrick Phillips, head of data science for Kinsa Health.
“Related to other states, Florida is a class of its own,’’ he said.
Nita Nehru, spokeswoman for Kinsa Health, said the thermometer data shows “that Florida is actually two times as severe in illness right now for what we would expect in a normal flu season based on the illness signature of a geography.
“Some of this activity may be due to a late resurgence of H1N1 flu, but it is definitely also picking up COVID,’’ she said.