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Waze for our Pandemic Journey

Ramesh Raskar, an Associate Professor at MIT, argues that despite spending billions of dollars and creating vaccines in a record time, in western democracies we failed to tame the pandemic because we missed one critical element in the pandemic response: citizen engagement. Crowdsourced data is the most powerful tool in a pandemic to achieve self-orchestration and social behavior change. Waze navigation app is a great example of self-orchestration. Drivers share their GPS data and Waze servers analyze traffic density and calculate emerging hotspots. Waze app gently nudges every driver to avoid those hotspots, via highly personalized hyper-local information. How can we navigate the haze of confusing data about exposures, symptoms, shutdowns, treatments and vaccination guidance, with an app that looks like Waze for the pandemic journey?

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