A map with a time slider is also what we want to build. DXY is an online platform maintained by the Chinese medical professionals that reports the total number of cases at the province level in China and updates every 15 minutes.įor regions such as Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, data is extracted from Twitter and news sources, and it is checked by the respective region’s local health authorities and WHO.Īccording to Dong, supporting the extraction of data from those regions which lack effective communication with DXY requires special technological equipment. 1, the CSSE employed a new data source, DXY, to semi-automate the map’s data processing. 22-31, data was processed manually and updated twice a day. The use of data during the deployment of the interactive map has also changed with the progression of COVID-19’s prevalence across worldwide communities. “At the same time we were still developing the infrastructure and data curation process, data sources were constantly changing and expanding as the virus spread from nation to nation.” “The main challenges arose because the virus spread so quickly in scope and scale,” Gardner explained. However, the data used to power the interactive map changed with the rapid pace of COVID-19’s spread, which caused difficulties in developing the interactive map. It is available to the public through a GitHub repository. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control and the National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China.
The data used to represent the findings on the map is sourced from the World Health Organization (WHO), the U.S. A dashboard displays the total number of confirmed cases and fatalities, both worldwide and regionally, and it was recently equipped to track the cumulative cases of recoveries. The tracking map allows users to toggle between different countries and cities across the world on the virtual map, which are colored with red hotspots to signify the active zones of COVID-19. “We decided to model COVID-19 starting in January because we knew the potential threat posted by an emerging infectious disease and we realized early that it had the potential to have an international impact, as was quickly evidenced in our CSSE reports,” she wrote. Gardner and her team recognized the potential international scope of the COVID-19 outbreak early and took quick action to examine the spread of the virus. That interest, combined with her background in network analysis and mathematical modeling, led to creation of the COVID-19 tracking map. In an email to The News-Letter, she described how she is particularly interested in modeling infectious diseases because of the interdependent human and environmental factors that underlie those diseases. Gardner has also previously tracked the outbreak of Zika and dengue.
That was Dong’s first project with the team he is now the “project manager” for the COVID-19 interactive map. “The dashboard caught lots of attention including from CNN and The New York Times,” Dong wrote in an email to The News-Letter. The team’s efforts to model measles risk in the U.S. The interactive map is a source for researchers, public health authorities and the general public to gauge the toll of COVID-19 pandemic, and it swiftly became prevalent across news channels, social media sites and other media platforms.ĭespite the map’s overwhelming presence across different media outlets and academic research reports, it is not Gardner’s first project to make headlines. The dashboard is maintained by the CSSE and was devised with technical support from the Applied Physics Laboratory and Esri Living Atlas for its mapping platform. Lauren Gardner, a civil and systems engineer professor at Hopkins and co-director of the CSSE, and Ensheng Dong, her graduate student, built the interactive dashboard that was made public on Jan. The Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at the Whiting School of Engineering supported the development of an interactive coronavirus (COVID-19) tracking map to visualize and monitor the evolution of COVID-19 as it spread throughout the world.