An-Najah News - A new interactive map created by Facebook shines light on the spread of the coronavirus: the map uses data from a survey of over 1 million Facebook users conducted by Carnegie Mellon University researchers over two weeks Rather than showing the number of people who have tested positive for COVID-19, it shows how many people have reported symptoms in a US county, Facebook said in a statement.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a blog post said "Facebook is uniquely suited to run these surveys because we serve a global community of billions of people and can do statistically accurate sampling, we do this in a privacy protective way where only the researchers at Carnegie Mellon see individual survey responses”.

Facebook said it would continue carrying out daily surveys to keep the map updated. While the map reflected only US counties on Monday, the company said it would start running surveys globally in the coming weeks.

Zuckerberg said the data gathered from Facebook users could help health authorities and governments decide how and when to reopen certain parts of the world in the coming months.