Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day one five since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. Our main story. Your fitbit can tell you a lot about how your body is working. Now. Scientists are wondering if wearable technology like this can help detect the earliest signs of coronavirus infection and help us combat the pandemic. But first, here's what happened in virus news today. The outlook for the global economy in the wake of coronavirus just got worse.
The International Monetary Fund said they now project the recession will be deeper and the recovery slower than they thought it would two months ago. Today, the i m F said it expects global gross domestic product to shrink four point nine percent this year. They had predicted three percent
in April. The shock to the supply chain was larger than the i m F anticipated, and for nations struggling to control the virus spread, a longer lockdown also will take a toll on growth That accounts for the fund's more pessimistic view. In the US, spikes in sun belt states continue while the virus situation improves. In former hotspots. Now New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut will require visitors from virus hotspots to quarantine for fourteen days to avoid
a resurgence in cases. The announcement is a reversal from March, when Texas and Florida ordered quarantines from the Northeast dates where cases were surging. Arizona, California, and Texas all set records for new cases on Tuesday. Finally, another disease could ravage certain populations because of the COVID nineteen pandemic. Tuberculosis could cause at least one ten thousand additional deaths in China, India, and South Africa, according to a study published by the
European Respiratory Journal. Disruptions to health services and delays to diagnosis and treatment will likely increase TV fatalities. That could have a greater impact on drug resistant TB patients as they often require longer treatment. And now for today's main story, the NBA is getting play. There's the option to wear a device that tracks their health data when basketball games begin this July. This device, called an aura ring, can
measure things like the body's temperature and heart rate. The hope is that it could provide the leak with early warning signs that someone may have contracted an illness like COVID nineteen. Bloomberg reporter Kristen V. Brown reports that the move is part of a larger conversation about whether or not wearable technology like a fitbit or an Apple Watch can help fight the pandemic. Here's Kristen. Every day I get a text from a Stanford research group reminding me
to fill out a series of questions. The questions are pretty straightforward. They're mostly related to COVID nineteen. Do you have any symptoms to report today? No? Feeling good? Have you received the results from any COVID nineteen tests today? Nope? Any other stems? I guess not really kind of had it? Tell me do you think that counts. I've been participating in this study for several weeks now, and when I'm done with my questionnaire, I also send them the data
my Apple Watch has captured for the day. The study is just one of several happening around the world a scientists raised to find out if wearable technology can play a role in the fight against the pandemic. They want to see if our fitbits can help predict whether users have contracted COVID nineteen days before they exhibit any discernible symptoms like a fever. A lot of the time, when people talk about predicting trends and infectious diseases like COVID nineteen,
they compare it to predicting the weather. Neither is a sure science. You can just make an educated guess. But to help more accurately predict the weather, we have all kinds of sensors in place all over the world. Wearables function in the same way for disease prediction. Initially, the makers of devices like the fitbit how did the ability of wearables to help users count steps, stay active, or monitor sleep. Increasingly, though they have also been used to
detect illness. Past research has shown that this biometric data could support health problems, including high blood pressure, heart arrhythmia as an early stage cancer. If wearables could accurately detect COVID nineteen cases early on, it could aid efforts to help monitor new outbreaks of the virus. This could take some of the pressure off of testing and contact tracing programs. Jennifer Ratten is leading one of these studies at SCRIPTS
Translational Research Insto in San Diego. California. She says they're basing these studies off of previous research that was published
this January. But we found is that we had a data set of two hundred thousand Fitbit users who were their device for about two years, and we found that if you identified weeks where individuals had arresting heart rate and sleep that was greater than their individual norm or average during the study period, that the proportion of Fitbit users each week who had this abnormal data was predictive of influenza like illness, and we were able to predict
influenza like illness in real time. Jennifer says that this kind of data could be really powerful when responding to COVID nineteen Scripts is monitoring the heart rate of about thirty volunteers to look for early signs of disease. So getting this data in real time has the potential to really improve outbreak response and to be able to identify when things are occurring and also be able to zoom in and identify kind of where those hot spots are.
So in U s um one in five Americans where's a smart watch or fitness tracker, So there's the potential to really harness a large amount of data for many users across the country. Like a lot of other research groups, Jennifer's work focuses on the heart rate data that these devices collect. Heart rate, it turns out, can be a
really good predictor of whether someone is getting sick. Jennifer says heart rate data can actually be a far better predictor of illness than more noticeable symptoms like a fever. That's especially true for COVID nineteen since so many people are asymptomatic, and often it seems there are changes to a person's heart rate long before other symptoms of an illness appear. Similar research from Stanford showed that wearables were able to detect an infection as early as nine days
before someone started showing symptoms of COVID nineteen. Jennifer also says that because many people are asymptomatic, trying to use data like temperature can miss a lot of cases. So lots of people with COVID don't um have a fever, they don't develop one early on in their infection, and there's also many asymptomatic cases out there who don't develop
any symptoms. So we think that just looking at temperature alone you might miss many cases out there, but we think that rusting heart rate and these other metrics collected with your wearables can potentially be an earlier warning signal that something's going on um and the Again, the great thing about the wearables is that we get each person's unique individual baseline, so that we're not comparing you to
the population average. We're comparing you to yourself over time, and that allows us to kind of identify more subtle changes in your data that may indicate something's going on in your health. This data could not only predict who's getting sick, but monitor a huge number of people relatively easily. Kimnall is the director of Telehealth at stony Brook University on Long Island in New York. She has her own wearable study. She says that this information could potentially be
really valuable in helping states to reopen safely. The hope is that we as a society define ways to determine risk for COVID, and you know, whoever determines that wins the grand prize of helping us reopen safely. The question where really is asking is what in the role of technology and wearable tech in in contributing to that To answering that question of who's at high risk and who's going to get sick and we don't know that yet,
you know. And so there's promise that if we have something that's passed of enough that gives us early flat red flags, that we can then act upon that data. Kim had COVID nineteen herself, and that was a big part of what motivated her work. I was very committed to understanding my own risk. You know, what was my temperature going to be and will I get sick again? These are these are the premise um questions, hypotheses that
we have in the study. She says. The data isn't just important for public health officials, it could also help people make better decisions in their own daily lives. Devices that can reliably predict the onset of COVID nineteen could play a major role in reopening workplaces, restaurants, and stores safely. A company could, for example, encourage returning workers to use an Apple Watch to look for signs there in early stages of the illness. The NBA is planning to do
just that. As basketball games resume in July. You can say like, well, my temperature is rising and have a fever yet, But my ring tells me that I might basick of COVID, let me sell me, let me social distance. That would be the dream of what we could aspire towards if we had the ability to know for certain we could rely on that data On an individual level.
Of course, that data cannot definitively tell you whether you're coming down with COVID nineteen or the flu, or maybe just experiencing an elevated heart rate because you're excited about a first date. But when taken together, all of that data suddenly becomes meaningful. That was Kristin V. Brown. You can read her story with Tom Giles Unwearables in the June two issue of Bloomberg Business Week or at Bloomberg
dot com. And that's our show Today. For coverage of the outbreak from one hut and twenty bureaus around the world, visit Bloomberg dot com slash Coronavirus and if you like the show, please leave us a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is produced by topor Foreheads, Jordan Gas Pure Magnus Hendrickson and me Laura Carlson. Today's main story was reported
by Kristin V. Brown. Original music by Leo Sidrin. Our editors are Rick Shine and Francesca Levy. Francesca Levy is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening.