Instagram Founders Launch Rt.live to Track COVID-19 Spread by State
Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger introduce Rt.live, a dashboard that visualizes the real-time transmission rate of COVID-19 across individual states to guide public health decisions.
Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger release Rt.live, their first joint project since departing Facebook. This new website serves as an up-to-date tracker that visualizes the transmission rate of COVID-19, known as Rt, for every US state. The metric measures the average number of people infected by each individual, where a score above 1 indicates rapid spread and a score below 1 shows the virus is receding.
The dashboard clearly illustrates how different policies impact the pandemic, highlighting that states with strict shelter-in-place orders like New York achieve much lower scores. Conversely, states without such mandates, particularly in the South, show higher and more dangerous transmission rates. The platform pulls its data from the COVID Tracking Project and relies on open-source modeling that Systrom originally developed through daily data analysis notebooks.
Rt.live provides valuable insights as state leaders consider reopening their economies by identifying which regions safely suppress the virus. Users filter the data by region to compare how different parts of the country handle the outbreak over time. By exposing the exponential effects of social distancing, the tool encourages public compliance and offers a practical way to monitor potential spikes if businesses reactivate too early.