A strikingly accurate thermometer map shows where cases of COVID-19 may surge next, and Florida is looking like a major hotspot

• One of the first, most ubiquitous symptoms of the novel coronavirus illness is a fever.
• Smart thermometer company Kinsa is using thousands of its thermometer readings from across the US to try to predict where COVID-19 might strike next.
• Kinsa is comparing where fevers are spiking to where they might be reasonably expected and predicted to spike, based on seasonal flu patterns.
• "Presumably, that's COVID-19," Kinsa's CEO told Business Insider, describing the "atypical" fevers his company has charted on a nationwide map. He is particularly struck by the high rates in Florida.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

One of the first, most ubiquitous, and easiest-to-measure tell-tale signs that someone might have the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, is a fever.

Perhaps that's why just about wherever he goes these days, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, (aka America's virologist-in-chief) gets his temperature taken.

"Every time I go into a different room, I get my temperature taken," Fauci said over the weekend at the White House.

Other infectious disease experts agree: a high temperature is a good first warning sign that someone might be sick. It's the reason why Taiwan instituted temperature checks for schoolkids and sports teams after COVID-19 broke out in China, and why the readings are mandatory at the airport in Hong Kong.

Now, as the US quickly becomes a global epicenter of the novel coronavirus pandemic, one thermometer company is hoping to help the country harness the same instantaneous disease detection strategy across America.

"In the context of any epidemic, healthcare workers do temperature monitoring," Kinsa founder and CEO Inder Singh told Business Insider, as he showed how his temperature tracking tool culls roughly 150,000 readings from homes across the US each day, looking for hotspots of illness at a county, but not a household level.

"It's aggregate data," Singh said, which means that thermometer readings can't be traced back to an individual person, but can detect clouds of illness.

Until now, the tool has been used largely as a seasonal flu tracker, and performs very well at predicting where flu outbreaks are surging in real time, weeks before the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does. It's useful information for deciding how to treat illness, and when it's best to stay home.

'Atypical' illnesses are popping up across the US, in states including Florida, Colorado, and New Jersey - and they might be COVID-19

As the global coronavirus pandemic has escalated, Kinsa has developed a new tool, one that charts what the company calls "atypical" illnesses.

"Basically, taking our real-time data signal and subtracting out what we would have normally expected from cold and flu," Singh said, based on historical trends.

It's possible that these outlier fever spikes could just be other flu strains, like H1N1, but Singh doesn't think they all are.

"The level of illness we're seeing in Florida is [two times] what we would have expected," he said. "That's very high, and it appears that it continues to grow. So, presumably, that's COVID 19. Presumably."

It's difficult to know exactly how many people in Florida might really have the coronavirus right now, because testing is just ramping up there. The state has confirmed 1,467 cases of COVID-19, with more than 16,000 people tested in recent days. It's a far smaller number of tests than some of the other most populous US states have administered, including California (27,600 tests) and New York (91,000 tests). Texas, the state with the second-largest population in the US, also lags behind in testing, with roughly 13,200 people tested.

"It's sort of like we're fighting an invisible forest fire," Benjamin Dalziel, a flu modeler and assistant math and biology professor at Oregon State University who helped developed Kinsa's new tool, told Business Insider.

Such a high-temperature fire could rage hard in places like Florida, where there are sizeable populations of people over 80, who have a death rate from COVID-19 of about 15%, as well as others with preexisting health conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure, which are all linked to higher than average death rates for COVID-19.

"The number of people who are going to be at risk is dramatically higher in the South," Jay Maddock, former dean of the School of Public Health at Texas A&M University recently told Undark.

Scott McNabb, a professor of public health at Emory University, who previously worked at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for two decades, told Business Insider that it shouldn't be this way, and there are ways for public health experts to collect more comprehensive, real-time illness data, while protecting every citizen's privacy, and human rights.

"We should know every reportable condition everywhere in the world, just like I can go to my iPhone and know the weather," McNabb said, adding that there's a lot of "hidden" information about Americans' health that gets sent from state health departments to the CDC, but it's not shared with people in real time. "You pay for the people that collect the information and that report it."

Besides Florida, other "atypical" hotspots across the US, according to Kinsa's new map, are popping up in regions of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama. You can have a look at what the data's like in your county, here.

"I would argue, in the absence of widespread testing, in the absence of any ability to allocate resources appropriately, you should be using this as an argument to say, I need to bring resources in, and you should be using this to monitor response," Singh said.

Get the latest coronavirus analysis and research from Business Insider Intelligence on how COVID-19 is impacting businesses.