From the moment the world went into pandemic lockdown officials have struggled to stay on top of the fast-moving crisis, both in terms of halting the spread of COVID-19 through social distancing and lockdown measures, as well as understanding and mitigating the severe shock to the economy and peoples’ lives. With governments, businesses and health experts flying blind, timely data has never been more vital.

As it turns out, one surprising solution may come down to our fat fingers.

In every economic crisis over the last century, people have ultimately turned to the world of medicine to help make sense of the fear and uncertainty around them. In the 1930s, political cartoons showed U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt as a doctor tending to an ailing Uncle Sam, whose bandages carried words like “banking” and “depression.” When the 1990s currency crisis in southeast Asia threatened to infect the rest of the world and trigger a global meltdown, economists and investors took to calling it the “Asian flu.” And in 2008, as America’s economy was felled by the financial crisis, then president Barack Obama urged lawmakers to “provide a blood infusion” to “make sure that the patient is stabilized.”

Never has the metaphor of an economy on life support been more appropriate than for the twin health and economic crises the entire world now faces. Canada, like nearly every other nation on the planet, has put its economy into an induced coma as it attempts to fight off the invading COVID-19 virus. Offices, factories, stores and restaurants are closed and workers have been ordered to stay home, many without paycheques, some unsure whether their jobs will still exist when the crisis abates.