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home / 世界杯决赛2022

new grassroots tool will help b.c. parents track school outbreaks

exposure watch allows you to select a school or schools and receive a text notification if there is a covid-19 event at the school

by vancouver sun

oct 4 2021
read time 2 minute read
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covid-19: new grassroots tool to help b.c. parents track school notifications, clusters and outbreaks
covid-19 notices at b.c. schools can now be accessed by text. vichai, getty images / png
by: david carrigg
a local software engineer has devised a way to send texts to b.c. parents warning of a school exposures, clusters or outbreaks.

gabriel bauman — a father-of-three who lives in new westminster — said he was inspired by the work of parents who manage then b.c. school covid tracker on facebook. this group gathers and curates all covid-19 notifications sent to schools and exists because the government does not provide this information in one place.

however, it caters only to facebook users.

“i am not on facebook too much, but last year i saw the moms that had picked up on exposure tracking. they are really well organized,” said bauman, who uses the data gathered from the facebook page, plus information sent directly to him through exposure.watch .

users can go to the exposure watch site and select just the schools that they are interested in, and then receive a text messages for any notifications related to those schools.
bauman said it took him a week to develop the system and costs $250 a month to operate. there are over 5,000 notification subscriptions with that number growing every day, he said.
bauman said he was disappointed the provincial government, with all its resources, could not come up with the same service that he is providing.
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“i think notifying people (by text) when there is an exposure is just basic pandemic sense at this point. i don’t know why they are making it so hard to find out what’s going on in school. it’s a patronizing,” he said.
the service is so popular that some messages had not been forwarded by the service provider because it believed that it could be spam.
“they thought we were spamming people marketing style. i have been having to work with the carriers and providers to deal with over aggressive filters in our case,” he said.
as of oct. 1 there had been 777 covid-19 notifications to 354 schools. during the most recent wave of b. c.s covid-19 pandemic, the cases in children aged 10 and under has been increasing at a faster rate than other age groups.
this is believed to be due to higher testing and that this age group (those aged 11 and under) are not yet eligible for covid-19 vaccination.

bauman is also using twitter to promote his notification service.

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