A Microsoft engineer who designed an app to
track North Dakota State University football fans
on their annual trek to Texas for the national
championship has taken that concept and
applied it to contact tracing for the coronavirus.
The Care19 app is meant to help reduce the
spread of COVID-19 by retracing the steps of
people who test positive for the virus, in order
to find others who may have had contact with
the sick person and also collect data to help
with modeling, Gov. Doug Burgum said Tuesday
during his daily briefing.
“This is a way that every North Dakotan can
save lives by downloading the Care19 app,”
Burgum said.
Tim Brookins, 55, a principal software engineer
at Fargo’s Microsoft campus and CEO of sports
app software company ProudCrowd, came up
with the popular Bison Tracker app a half-dozen
years ago. Last year, more than 15,000 football
fans from various states and provinces accessed
the app en route to North Dakota State’s eighth
national title in nine years.