During the pandemic situation imposed by COVID-19, emerged the need of isolation, as an attempt to stop its spread. However, even though it is an essential measure, it was responsible for installing fear on the population, that now is affraid of going out and even more afraid of going to a hospital. This concern is making people not want to seek for medical help for any kind of symptoms that may appear, what is increasing the number of deaths by other diseases, that usually can have an easy solution. All things considered, we believe our project will be able to surpass this problem that appeared with the isolation by avoiding that people continue to ignore the symptoms of diseases they might have just because of the fear of the pandemic.
After a solid discussion about the global sittuation and the problems that emerged with the arise of COVID-19, we realized that there are some allarming data of increases on cases of some diseases, and it caught our attention, motivating us to choose this challenge. This is due to the fear that was installed in the population, which is inhibiting people from going to the hospitals to have the medical assistance that is necessary. Two coutries that stand out in this sittuation are Brazil and United States of America (USA), that are responsible for concentrating many cases of COVID-19 infections. Acconding to Johns Hopkins University data from May 30th 2020, availabe on SEDAC's (NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center) Global COVID-19 Viewer, USA leads in most number of confirmed cases, with 1,747,087, followed by Brazil with 465,166. While these numbers increase, the fear among the population increases proportionally, inhibiting even more the search for medical assistance for other health conditions. On an interview for CNN Brasil, the cardiologist of the highly regarded Hospital Albert Einstein, Leandro Echenique, explained that the number of people looking for medical assistance when presenting symptoms of heart diseases has decreased drastically during this pandemic times, and he associates that with the fear of contamination with COVID-19 on the hospital environment. Also, according to the doctor, this scenario can be responsible for increasing the number of deaths by heart attacks on the country. A very similar situation can be seen in the USA, as a study made at the University of Mississippi Medical Center presents. Data from this study shows that the number of hospitalizations for heart failure had an average of 30 per week, 2 weeks before the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Mississippi. After the first case, this number declined to 15 per week and continued to decline even more with time. At the last two weeks of analysis this number was around 5. Thinking about this chaotic scenario, we had the idea to develop an app that could help minimize this issue.
https://1drv.ms/p/s!AhjRq830WZx6bC_EIzGQ9SW0sug?e=yZvP8B
https://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/mapping/popest/covid-19/
Hall ME, Vaduganathan M, Khan MS, et al. Reductions in Heart Failure Hospitalizations During the COVID-19 Pandemic [published online ahead of print, 2020 May 13]. J Card Fail. 2020;10.1016/j.cardfail.2020.05.005. doi:10.1016/j.cardfail.2020.05.005