![]() “It’s efficient, but it’s boring,” Gardner said. The conversation continues through a myriad of Slack channels, emails and phone calls. Their days begin with Zoom calls during which they hash out to-do lists and pressing issues. Like a lot of people, they’re working from home. They had no idea “that it would evolve into something that literally impacts almost everybody’s life on the planet,” Gardner said.įrom erratic data to the map on our screensĪbout 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. What was once a modest goal to fill a research gap in a field with antiquated methods for disease tracking is now a tool widely used around the world. Gardner and her team work to maintain the Covid-19 dashboard, built by her team at Johns Hopkins University. “Initially, right now, it’s their time to worry about my situation in the US,” Dong said. The responsibility for this dashboard gives me energy.”īut as cases became globally widespread, they needed help. “I think this is what the research should do. Has maintaining those responsibilities affected his health in any way? “Not really,” he said. With Gardner’s blessing, he pushed back a required course until the fall semester. And the rest of his PhD experience is going to be really boring, but I don’t think he believes me.”įor two weeks from dawn till dusk, Dong lived and breathed the dashboard it took precedence over his free time outside of class and soon the classes themselves. “I keep telling him that he needs to not get used to this and it’s not normal. “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. The map’s alarming red dots then reflected only 320 reported cases - mostly in China, the rest in Thailand, Japan and South Korea. His background in spatial data visualization and Gardner’s past in modeling infectious diseases converged to create the first iteration of the dashboard - which they finished that night and published the next day. On January 21, over coffee during a weekly research meeting, Dong proposed this idea to Gardner. “We were collecting data on a new virus that nobody understood at a time there was not a single web page dedicated to Covid-19 case count,” said Lauren Gardner, the project’s chief and an associate professor in, and codirector of, the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering.įirst-year PhD student Ensheng Dong helped create the dashboard in less than a day. ![]() ![]() Government agencies, public health departments, the public and news outlets, including CNN, regularly rely on it for the latest updates on the confirmed cases, deaths and recoveries connected to this harrowing disease. By their measurement, interactions include uses of the public dashboard and requests from a separate website for the underlying data used by news outlets and others who design their own maps and graphics. ![]() They report that the site, plus downloads of its data, hosts three to five billion interactions daily. 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.Ī 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.Īnd the world came to their door. ![]()
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