The company will continue mapping COVID-19 infections alongside wildfire, hurricane, tornado and other disaster data in the coming months. “It’s about seeing them in relation to other events, such as natural disasters, that our customers have to respond to.” “It’s not just about seeing COVID-19 cases,” explains Jeff Schott, co-founder of Earthvisionz. Now it's added COVID-19 alerts to the mix. Earthvisionz also traced the boundaries of the Boulder County Flood of 2013, notifying users such as insurance companies and county workers of road closures and areas the flood had damaged during the initial crisis as well as long after the water receded. In Colorado, the application was used in 2012 to track the devastating Waldo Canyon Fire outside of Colorado Springs, providing live feeds of the fire's perimeter, satellite imagery and wind conditions that allowed telecommunications company TW Telecom to limit its losses. Earthvisionz began marketing the product for commercial use in 2015, and current clients range from real estate firms to utility and energy companies. and Pacific Rim, was the first organization to benefit from VAST. Air Force, which has thirteen Air Education and Training Command bases around the U.S. VAST maps those dispersed assets and provides live notifications for 144 types of severe weather, natural disaster and social unrest - and now, it includes a special alert for COVID-19.
Earthvisionz bills itself as a real-time geolocation risk-management firm, helping organizations with people and properties spread out in multiple locations prepare for, respond to and recover from weather events and other disasters. This new initiative is a natural outgrowth for the company, which was founded in 2010 to fill a key need: combining real-time data alerts with mapping technology in a geospatial risk-management application dubbed VAST. “We are the glue between pieces of information, which is important at this stage when we don’t have really good ways to protect people except for social distancing and wearing face masks." “Our targeted subscribers right now are first responders, Homeland Security, FEMA, local law enforcement - anyone who needs to be aware of their health protection wherever they are,” she notes. The company, which pulls its live data from sources ranging from universities and state agencies to the Centers for Disease Control, expects to track the virus for the next twelve to eighteen months, when experts expect multiple waves of infection beyond the initial outbreak. “It’s a one-stop shop that aggregates key data, puts it into a format that’s easy to read, and allows you to link to your location,” Johnson explains, adding that her firm began following the virus back in January, before most people in the U.S. And anyone can receive the alert by subscribing to a private Google Group mailing list.
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