It’s time to pivot Covenant, our open source COVID-19 Quarantine Management System to its roots. I’ve been leading the development of Covevnant, which I co-founded with Avinash Kumar Gupta. A diverse team of clinicians, informaticists, developers and translators (20+ human languages) from multiple countries volunteered with NO funding.
We’d published a beta and we were working towards a production release. However, the opportunity for electronic quarantine management has passed due to widespread community transmission.
So, we have decided to pivot our efforts. The original idea for Covenant came out of a grant application I had submitted 2 years go – a mobile device-based anonymous crowdsourced system for both infectious and noninfectious diseases. Privacy protection is baked into the design, with strict access controls and keeping individual-level data within a country’s physical borders.
Now we are back to pursuing our original idea subject to research grants. Covenant is the foundation that has gotten it off the ground, so we don’t have to start from scratch now.
Thanks to our entire team of volunteers and contributors, including those who chose to be anonymous.
So long, and thanks for all the fish. We’ll keep you posted as we resume working on the pivot.