A humble team at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland reminded the world of late poet Ralph Waldo Emerson's phrase when they created a real time tracking map of coronavirus cases and deaths. Meet the team updating the pandemic's most visited website.
If the year 2020 is good for anything, it's the lesson that during a crisis, anyone who builds a better mousetrap will find the world beating a path to his door.
"He's gotten to play some pretty major roles in some really central problems to the society for someone that's six months into a degree program," Gardner said. "I keep telling him that he needs to not get used to this and it's not normal. And [that] the rest of his PhD experience is going to be really boring, but I don't think he believes me."
They had no idea "that it would evolve into something that literally impacts almost everybody's life on the planet," Gardner said.About 25 people from multiple disciplines now support the dashboard, including graduate students and senior software developers and research scientists primarily based in Maryland, California and England.
The teams manually validate and approve numbers before letting them be processed through a geographic information systems tool into"Not to be cliche, but a picture is worth a thousand words," Lau said. The APL team works on building and maintaining the automated capabilities of the data-pulling code.
The map places at people's fingertips "information upon which they can make really important decisions," said Jennifer Nuzzo, who works on projects similar to Blauer's, but for the Coronavirus Resource Center. Nuzzo is an associate professor in the university's Bloomberg School of Public Health and a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
And sometimes the numbers between state and county health departments don't match up — they report differently or at varying times.The biggest challenge is trying to collect data "from multiple locations simultaneously and provide it in real time while all of those dynamics are at play," Gardner said. Knowing there are so many eyes on it and having to explain it is difficult, too, she added.
Data on testing and contact tracing could illuminate long-term patterns regarding race, socioeconomic status and systemic barriers to testing access — an effort headed by Blauer and Nuzzo.
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