
Ask HN: Can we collectively build a C19 test location site? - AndrewKemendo
Right now there&#x27;s no one stop place to know where you can get tested for coronavirus in the US or globally. Nobody else is building this that I am aware of.<p>It seems like the HN community is well positioned to actually do this. So I could host it but I&#x27;d need others to help build it and source data.<p>Edit. I just registered c19testlocations.com
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DataDrivenMD
I want to help. I had posted something here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22577611](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22577611)

But will support any effort so long as we get it done. I can help from the
medical and the technical side of things. What’s the best way to sync up?

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Send me an email akemendo@gmail.com

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badrabbit
Cvs,walgreens,walmart are doing it.

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AndrewKemendo
Is it every one of those? You have more information than me so I think that's
the valuable thing to share.

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gus_massa
You are trying to help, but you will get a lot of false positives, and it will
cause more problems.

Lot of test are useful if you can vaccine all the people that meet the (false)
positives cases, and all the people that meet the people that meet the (false)
positives. This is a vaccination rings
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_vaccination](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_vaccination)
but there are no vaccines for now.

Another possibility is to quarantine all that people for two weeks just in
case, but if someone disagree you must convince the police to enforce that,
and hopefully the police is following the advice of the CDC and want an
official test.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
I'm not doing the testing. Simply creating a place people can go to find out
where to get tested.

Can't know if you should be quarantined if you don't get tested.

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jka
While I can't commit to helping out with code or resources at the moment, this
sounds like a promising idea.

To get something up and running, it could be worth searching the web for
services and code that solve similar problems and starting with a proof-of-
concept or draft version.

The solution sounds similar to a 'store locator' (like USPS / large retail
chains provide); using that in some searches yielded the following:

\- [https://www.mapcustomizer.com](https://www.mapcustomizer.com) \- this
looks basic but allows plotting locations on a map and provides bulk entry,
which could be performed and managed from a Google Sheet by a team

\- [https://batchgeo.com/features/store-
locator/](https://batchgeo.com/features/store-locator/) \- these folks
specifically offer a service for building a store locator and they also
provide geocoding (translating addresses -> latitude and longitude). It's not
free but looks inexpensive -- at least for a small number of user accounts.

\- [more advanced, would require self-hosting] Google have a tutorial on
creating your own store locator using PHP and MySQL with Google Maps here:
[https://developers.google.com/maps/solutions/store-
locator/c...](https://developers.google.com/maps/solutions/store-
locator/clothing-store-locator)

\- [most advanced, caveats apply] if building something from scratch, Solr
geospatial[0] and leaflet.js could be starting points, along with something
like uszipcode[1] to determine the user's origin long/lat to search-by-
distance. Ultimately an approach like this risks sinking time into developing
scripts and data processing that replicate what others already provide online
as a service. It would provide more control over the experience and
functionality however.

The concerns other commenters raise about false positives are valid - but it's
likely that if such a service does become successful enough to produce
noticeable test center foot traffic, the development team could communicate
with those health services to update the messaging as-needed (or pause the
service).

I'd encourage posting any data you collect and geocode to an open source
repository in GitHub or elsewhere so that others could build related tools
and/or contribute improvements and corrections back.

As an example of that approach: Johns Hopkins have been great at sharing the
C19 global case data they're gathering[2] and at the time of writing there are
3.2k forks created from that dataset which is a good initial indicator of
interest.

Good luck!

[0] -
[https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/SOLR/SpatialSear...](https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/SOLR/SpatialSearch#SpatialSearch-
QuickStart#)

[1] -
[https://pypi.org/project/uszipcode/](https://pypi.org/project/uszipcode/)

[2] -
[https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19](https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19)

