Microsoft engineer adapts fan-tracking app for Covid19 use

Bismarck: 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 Covid19 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.

Burgum, a former executive at Microsoft, sparked the idea at a COVID-19 brainstorming session with Microsoft engineers when he introduced Brookins as the creator of Bison Tracker.

“My staff just lit up and said, ‘That’s what we need,’” Brookins told The Associated Press.