On March 16, 2020, a team of 25 engineering students at the University of Toronto (U of T) led by first-year engineering student Shrey Jain launched Flatten, an online dashboard that allows individuals to self-report and view maps of the spread of COVID-19 in Canada. Flatten asks seven questions and requests the first three characters of an individual’s postal code. It then generates a national heatmap of confirmed COVID-19 cases, potential cases, and vulnerable individuals—the latter including elderly people with serious health concerns and individuals who are immunosuppressed. The tool requests only the first three digits of a postal code so as not to invade an individual’s privacy, “but still segment data to be granular and valuable.”
The name “Flatten” comes from the popular concept of “flattening the curve,” spreading infection cases out over a long period of time. Flatten’s dataset consists of information the site gathers from self-reports, as well as public health information collected from releases issued by the country’s provinces each day. The tool uses a color range from light yellow (between 1 and 10 cases) to dark red (501+ cases), to show COVID-19 hotspots. The map opens with its view centered on Toronto. A user can zoom out to see the spread of the disease in other locations. They can also zoom in to view the number of cases in specific neighborhoods.
Jain said the site started as an individual project and has evolved into a Toronto-based nonprofit, also called Flatten. Jain now serves as the nonprofit’s president. “I come from a house where a lot of my relatives are older and could be affected. I kicked off this project and started working closely with many of my friends, including other engineering students at U of T, to inform others,” said Jain.
Flatten reduces the risk of false reports by using cookies and reCAPTCHA. It also notes potential duplicate reports and tracks suspicious IP addresses. Jain said the site utilizes HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on the frontend, the part of the application that users interact with directly, and Python on the backend, the part of the application that allows the program to run. The site uses Node.js to connect the frontend to the backend and Google Cloud Platform for the servers.
Google Cloud Platform has sponsored the site by providing credits for Google Cloud. The Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a U of T institute, has also sponsored the site by connecting Jain’s group with legal advice from Osler, Harcourt & Hoskin LLP, a Toronto-based law firm.
The site, which Jain said has over 120,000 users, is currently receiving help from U of T’s social media channels to spread awareness.
“One of the things we’re working to address is that certain areas of Canada don’t have Internet access. It would help to get more government support and to develop contacts with hospitals. That way they could spread the message and input information when they receive it rather than us having to wait for reports from the provinces,” said Jain.
Other leads for the site include Yifei Zhang, dev team lead; Martin Staadacker, maps team systems integration lead; Arthur Allshire, cloud team lead; Surya Krishnan, front-end maps lead; and Sejal Jain, outreach lead. Sejal Jain, Shrey Jain’s sister, is currently a junior at Port Credit Secondary School in Mississauga. Sejal and Shrey’s father, Dr. Minto Jain, an intensivist, or a physician who provides special care for critically ill patients, is a site advisor.
Shrey Jain said creating the website has taught him that if people work cooperatively and passionately, “really cool things can come out of it.”
“You can learn so much in a classroom, but it’s what you do with it outside the classroom that starts to matter,” said Shrey Jain.
The Flatten site also acts as a source of information about the symptoms and methods of transmission of COVID-19. It contains up-to-date warnings and information, provided by numerous doctors who advise the site. This group of medical professionals includes Dr. Shafi Bhuyian, a professor at the University of Toronto and chair of the Canadian Coalition for Global Health Research.