about.html

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title: About CoEpi
description: CoEpi built a privacy-first system for anonymous Bluetooth proximity-based exposure alerting based on voluntary symptom sharing.
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<h3 id="dealing-with-a-covid-19-pandemic">Dealing with a COVID-19 pandemic</h3>
<p>As individual COVID-19 outbreaks grew and merged into a global pandemic, and responses transition from containment to mitigation, the question came up: “What can we do?” As public health authorities scrambled to trace contacts, ensured health systems were prepared, and began to implement wider social distancing measures as outbreaks spread, the advice to individuals remains simple: scrub down your hands with soap after touching surfaces, stay home from work or school if sick, wear a mask, get vaccinated, etc. This is good advice, but leaves open the question of when it’s appropriate to take more disruptive action to reduce transmission risk.</p>
<h3 id="what-we-can-do-together">What we can do together</h3>
<p>The CoEpi project attempts to bridge the gap between governmental public health actions and individual attention to hygiene. We believe it is possible to combine modern smartphone technology and cloud computing to empower individuals and their personal networks to automatically and anonymously track their own contacts, and inform themselves and their friends and family about increased infection risks. This will allow individuals to make informed risk-based decisions about when it’s most important to implement additional social distancing measures above and beyond the measures being recommended community-wide. Because the virus that causes COVID-19 can be transmitted while people do not have symptoms, early notification of exposure can encourage people to self-quarantine when they may be contagious but before they are sick. This is critical for stopping wide-spread transmission. It will also enable communities with active community transmission to track and quarantine chains of infection remotely and at scale. Other communities will achieve earlier, and more complete detection when COVID arrives. Through digital interaction, personal contact and risks are decreased, and frontline medical resources are reserved for individuals that truly require emergency medical care.</p>
<h3 id="the-coepi-team">The CoEpi team</h3>
<p>The CoEpi project team consisted of a small group of individuals with diverse and relevant skills who felt the need to put those skills to use in service of our own loved ones, our broader social networks, our communities, and humanity. We are committed to working openly and transparently, publishing all of our work completely open-source for anyone to use in any way they can, to make sure we are all doing everything we can to minimize the death and disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. CoEpi was founded by and is led by <a href="https://twitter.com/danamlewis">Dana Lewis</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/scottleibrand">Scott Leibrand</a>. </p>
<h3 id="how-you-can-help">How you can help</h3>
<p>CoEpi is an open source project, and you can see our active repositories <a href="https://github.com/Co-Epi">here</a>.</p>
<p>If you’re interested in diving in on this project, and have any idea of how you could help, please reach out to <a href="https://twitter.com/danamlewis">Dana</a> or <a href="https://twitter.com/scottleibrand">Scott</a>.</p>
<h3 id="find-us-on-github">Find us on Github - everything is open source</h3>
<p>You can find all of our work open source on Github. Our <a href="https://github.com/Co-Epi">CoEpi organization</a> holds multiple repositories, including the content of this website. PRs are welcome!</p>
<ul>
<li><p><a href="https://github.com/Co-Epi/website">CoEpi website</a></li>
<li><p><a href="https://github.com/Co-Epi/app-ios">CoEpi for iOS</a></li>
<li><p><a href="https://github.com/Co-Epi/app-android">CoEpi for Android</a></li>
<li><p><a href="https://github.com/Co-Epi/coepi-backend-aws">CoEpi AWS backend</a></li>
<li><p><a href="https://github.com/Co-Epi/app-backend-rust">CoEpi shared iOS/Rust backend library</a></li>
<p></ul>
<p>Our <a href="https://github.com/Co-Epi/.github/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md">Contributing guide</a> applies to all of these repositories, and also has information with how you can get added to the CoEpi slack channel if you are interested in being an active contributor. </p>