# Problem
Our goal is to fill the **gaps in public health knowledge** by crowdsourcing data from citizens to improve pandemic responses.
In a pandemic, data is one of the most important tools for policymakers, public health officials, and health system agents. Citizens need to have easy access to exposure alerts, symptoms, testing, treatment, and vaccination, but much of this journey is not shared with public health and remains invisible to the health system.
These gaps in data gathering, especially about activities, contacts, and status of citizens are one of the key challenges for an effective response. **The data-scarce planning leads to inefficiencies, lives lost, and socio-economic costs**.
Technological app-based solutions can be used to fill in gaps, but they currently suffer from two key problems that make citizens uncooperative and disengaged:
1. A **lack of incentives** for users to adopt and engage with the app
2. Citizen’s **privacy concerns** and the fear of the government becoming a surveillance state.
How can we achieve crowdsourcing, privacy, and personalized engagement in a pandemic? And how can we simultaneously provide planning tools for public health by making citizen data available in real-time?
---
# Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation
If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question.
Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter:
```
GET https://prep.pathcheck.org/problem.md?ask=
```
The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language.
The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation.
Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.