Maybe the way I could sort of frame what we have been building with the metaphor of a smoke detector and fire extinguisher. For six and a half years, we've been building systems to be able to detect threats early, because we know, as I mentioned, that time is our most valuable resource.
To be able to quickly go from detection to what kind of risks we are facing—not just from the dispersion of the disease, but what kind of disruption might occur—is very important because diseases spread around the world all the time. They don't all cause outbreaks or pandemics. That is a complex requirement because every disease behaves differently. Zika virus is different from Ebola, which is different from COVID-19 or measles for that matter.
We've been spending a number of years building up that capacity to have a bird's-eye view of what's happening around the planet, to be able to relate it to geographies across the planet, and to do this in, really, a matter of seconds.
With respect to once an outbreak starts to spread and is now occurring locally, this is where we have been using—again, I want to underscore, anonymously—just the pings, the digital locations from hundreds of millions of mobile apps and mobile devices.
That kind of information can help us understand. Ultimately, this is a virus that spreads, as Dr. Fisman mentioned, through the movements and interactions of people. These are really rich datasets—over three billion data points a day—that can really allow us to understand how those movements are occurring so that we can then start to anticipate how the epidemic might evolve. It also allows us to generate insights about some of the non-pharmaceutical interventions like physical distancing or recommendations for quarantine. Are those being adhered to at a population level?
I do want to highlight that we're not tracking anyone who is infected or their contacts. We're looking at population movement.
With respect to going forward to the next wave, I think the simple reality is that no one really quite knows what this is going to look like or exactly how it's going to unfold. We are dealing with a completely novel disease. Certainly, we have concerns that as we get into the latter months in the fall.... We know that coronaviruses tend to be in cooler, drier climates where they may be more efficiently transmitted. As that occurs, currently we are relating a lot of this mobility data to understanding how the epidemic curve is evolving. Perhaps there are lessons that we can learn about which geographies and which locations seem to be opening up society in such a way that they can, you know, generate some sense of normalcy and some kind of economic activity without having an exponential increase in the epidemic. I think that's really the $6,400 question. How do we do this gracefully? How do we thread the needle?
These are things that I, candidly speaking, don't know anyone has the answers for just yet. I think it goes back to the point that surveillance, testing and monitoring are critically important, because as we start to reopen society, it is going to be incredibly important for us to be watching very closely what the response is in terms of epidemic activity and transmission.
I hope that I perhaps have given you a little bit of a sense of what we're thinking going forward.