Just in time for the mother and father of all panics, we present SickCity, a neat disease tracker which makes use of Twitter to track epidemics across the globe. The code is open source, the graphs look pretty if a little scary, and it’s part of the uber cool DIY City program which promises to democratise the running of our cities. Yay!
SickCity watches Twitter (and soon Facebook) for any mentions of disease in a city. It then collects this information and presents it over time through graphs. SickCity is still quite new. Our algorithms are improving everyday and we are still getting in historical data for some cities.
And if there's no reference to disease in a certain location, there's either no sickness or everybody there has already died.