Welcome to Axis ProRata, where we get you smarter on the collision of tech, business, and politics.

I'm Dan Pramak. On today's show, the small business loan pool gets refilled and Facebook buys big into India.

But first, tech tracks the coronavirus. So late last Friday night, two of the biggest names in Silicon Valley.

Instagram co-founders Kevin Sistram and Mike Krieger launched their first new project since leaving Facebook in 2018.

It's called RT Live and is designed to help fight the coronavirus pandemic by tracking the rate of viral spread, state by state.

In short, it basically gives each state a score updated regularly based on information coming from local health officials.

And when you look at this thing, the score to keep in mind is the number one.

If you're below one, that basically means the curve is flattened and the rate of spread is decelerating.

If you're above one, it's the opposite.

It's bad.

The spread is accelerating. Now, for context, on Wednesday afternoon when we tape this,

the state with the highest score, and that is not a good thing, is Nebraska at 2.0, while the lowest

was Idaho at 0.19. Overall, 30 states are currently below one. Now, why it matters is that state and local

governments are currently trying to figure out when, where, and how to reopen parts of society.

And Instagram's co-founders believe this project could become an important tool to help them.

And overall, this reflects how lots of technologists are working on new data projects that

not only could be used in this pandemic, but whatever might be fallous in the future.

We'll go deeper with Instagram co-founder Kevin Sistram.

So, Kevin, let's kind of go to the genesis of RT Live.

What was it that you thought was lacking that you want and Mike wanted to kind of try to help rectify?

Well, I think there are two things.

The first is that I didn't feel like there was any good sense of how things were going.

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