Why we build a platform to register immunized citizens

Can we mobilize the recovered citizens and use the superpower of immunity to keep up critical societal functions and provide better help for the infected?

I posted this question last week in social media, and now more than 200 resourceful people from the norwegian (and increasingly global!) technology scene mobilized in an open source initiative to answer it. We formed a small group and spent a few days conceptualizing and defining scope.

Say hello to The Wemunity Project.

Recruit and utilize the immune citizens

The idea is very simple: An online service where people that recover from the corona virus disease can register — to help maintain important functions in society and ease the job of burdened health professionals. The volunteers register through an onboarding service — with geolocation and relevant skills and experience (eg driver licence class).

The system should serve the needs of government organizations (or NGOs such as Doctors without Borders, if the public health care is lacking) and adapted to the needs in different regions. We will build this so that the service that that can be localized and customized to serve different languages, situations and jurisdictions. We think of this as an emergency digital infrastructure that can adapted to fit the needs on the ground, and parachuted from the cloud. The aggregated list of helpers in a region should be made available to dedicated organisations in a safe and secure way, both through an API and an application to find the right helper for the right task at the right place. We will build a search and filter tool so the right helpers can be found and called upon as extra hands are needed.

Medical approval is key

This registration process, combining clinically approved immunity with capability metadata, can prove important. People with field experience from the Ebola outbreak told us that the recovered and immunized patients have proven vital in earlier viral epidemics. They can treat patient without protection and they do not carry around the virus. There are many societal functions of importance that needs to be maintained, such as transport assignments, home visits and non-medical tasks in medical facilities.

A key question is of course whether immunity is acquired, and can be clinically confirmed with accuracy. There are reasons to be optimistic regarding this. Serological tests (blood samples) measuring antibodies are already on the market. In the solution we will helpers will be available once they are approved by health professionals. We are still awaiting the diagnostic criteria to be developed, and we will have to wait for a few more weeks for the blood tests for antibodies to be widely available.

There are many potential immune helper out there already, as many go through the infection with no or very mild symptoms. But there are also many people potentially carrying viruses in roles where an immune person would serve as a shield.

As people are gradually checked out of the danger zone, they should be checked into the the network of helpers. By sourcing the recovered, we can build the civic response capacity in line with the magnitude of the pandemic. To utilize this capacity strategically, it is key to register the immune individuals, their location, professional skills and experience. These date should be made available as structured data, in real time.

Supporting a wider ecosystem
We need a range of services to deal with this crisis, and we should try to make them enrich each other. All around the world, local peer-to-peer networks of citizens that help and look after each other are now established. A beautiful manifestation of humanity and solidarity. In helper groups, immune individuals could potentially serve functions of great importance.

We therefore exploring the possibility of third party integration, where the immune can choose to share their immunity status with third party services. Can we grow a create a wider ecosystem around the onboarding service for the immune? This will be explored further down the road.

There are many questions, both legal and clinically, to be explored in this project. The platform will probably carry some personal health data, and this is heavily regulated, especially in the EU. Luckily we have expertise in health law and dataprotection on the team.

Building a team from below

The process so far has been amazing, and somewhat crazy. 200 contributors just within a week. A structured plan is now gradually emerging, with working groups and issues. The energy in the project reflects the severe situation we are facing: SarsCov-2 is a potentially dangerous virus to all of us, and the current lockdown has devastating consequences both for societal functions and the global economy.

The challenge ahead is highly interdisciplinary. We need academic expertise, doctors with field experience, legal experts, UX designers and developers to work alongside each other. We also need to monitor the situation on the ground in different parts of the world, and discuss with government representatives. The system will be build under the MIT license, as we want it to be further developed and adapted to local conditions.

The process is still in its initial phase, but we hope to validate the concept fast — and create v1.0 of a service that may prove useful in dealing with the ongoing (and possibly also future) viral outbreaks in different parts of the world.

The project was initiated by New & company and Deloitte Digital. It is currently supported by people from Sanity.io, Norce, Nyby, Nabohjelp, Netlife, Knowit and Shortcut. And we got great support from the people at Slack and Airtable.

The project is currently looking for both institutional partnerships as well as technical, clinical and financial support to get off the ground.

Please feel free to join the Facebook community. We communicate in english and the project is also open to people outside of Norway.

Contact person:
Anders Waage Nilsen
+ 47 918 14 356
anders@new.no
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