The situation surrounding the spread of COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus, is changing seemingly hour by hour. On Sunday, Gov. Charlie Baker ordered all public and private schools to close for three weeks and limited restaurants to only takeout and delivery, as the total number of infected residents in the state rose to 164.
It's a lot to take in. It's also a lot to keep up with; Baker also banned gatherings of more than 25 people, a tenth of the threshold of 250 he'd set the previous week.
As cities work to get information to their residents, one startup is stepping up to the plate: Soofa, a six year-old, Cambridge-based company behind smart benches and signs that display advertisements and information to whomever happens to be walking by.
These days, a lot of what's being displayed is information about school closures, canceled events and the availability of civic services like libraries and transit.
"When this COVID outbreak started, we reached out to all our city partners, and we created templates for them. We offered to create design content for them so they could easily post announcements without spending much time on designing," said Lyra Schweizer, Soofa's director of city growth. "It's been a really great tool, because a lot of the people that we talked with might not necessarily have a formal communications department, or they don't have many other ways that they could disseminate this information to people who might not be online actively. This is another use of our communication platform: to push out emergency messaging during a time like this."
In Greater Boston, Soofa currently partners with the cities of Boston, Somerville, Everett, Malden and Brookline, Schweizer said.
Soofa also works with private organizations, including museums and schools, that have been directly impacted by COVID-19. Schweizer said Soofa has allowed those advertisers flexibility to change or shorten their display campaigns. Some have used Soofa as a way to redirect potential visitors: Boston Architectural College, for example, now suggests to Soofa viewers that they take a virtual tour of campus.
Another of Soofa's longstanding goals is to help cities with urban planning. Today, Soofa's sensors track pedestrian activity at its smart benches and signs, information the company can then send to city officials who are working to keep their residents from moving about to limit the spread of the virus. (If you do want to take a walk to get some fresh air and avoid cabin fever, make sure you do it where there aren't many other pedestrians to maintain social distancing.)
"It hasn't been long enough to make any kind of concrete conclusions, but we're seeing some initial trends that it seems like pedestrian activity is staying the same if not increasing in more residential neighborhoods, and then in the places where there are offices, like downtown Boston, pedestrian traffic seems to initially be going down," Schweizer said.
