“There's so many things that, if we had a hundred people that we could get just helping to pull this feedback together and do something with it, it would be great. Keeping up with all the suggestions, queries, and bug fixes, Gardner says, has been nearly impossible. Ensheng Dong and his colleagues maintain the dashboard round-the-clock. A paper describing the dashboard, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases on 19 February, has already been cited 79 times, according to Google Scholar. The underlying dataset, stored on the code-sharing site GitHub, has been “starred” - that is, favorited - nearly 20,000 times, with nearly 1,700 submitted suggestions or bug reports and over 350 suggested data changes (“pull requests”). (So timely is the dashboard, in fact, that it often reports countries’ first cases before local health authorities do.) Today, the dashboard is fed mostly using automated web-scraping and aggregation, updating nearly in real time. So the team looked for ways to automate the process. But as the disease spread, that quickly became unsustainable. Initially, those data were collected and input manually, first by Dong and then by students working round-the-clock in shifts.
From there, Dong says, they are pushed to Esri’s ArcGIS platform, which renders the dashboard and its visualizations. Those data are collected, aggregated, and published to GitHub. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, the National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China, and media and health departments around the world. That experience made it straightforward to build a dashboard for COVID-19.ĭata come from a variety of sources including social media, the World Health Organization, the U.S. Before COVID-19 broke out, Gardner and Dong had been looking for likely measles hotspots, using ArcGIS, a geospatial mapping tool from Esri, based in Redlands, California, to visualize their modeling results. “I think both of us were just pretty surprised with the general public interest.”Īccording to Dong, the dashboard was easy to build in part because the team had already built something like it. The team had anticipated the numbers would be more in the order of hundreds or thousands. The map receives more than a billion interactions a day - a number that includes both people visualizing the map and those who are mining the underlying data, Gardner says. The intended audience, Gardner notes, was the research community - other epidemiologists and disease modelers, for instance. And let's go ahead and visualize it while we're at it. “It was a bit of a spur-of-the-moment decision to say, let's build out this data set and let's keep doing it, let's make it public. But realising other researchers could also benefit, the team decided to make the data more widely available. Her team could use such data to build more accurate mathematical models of the disease’s likely spread. The sudden outbreak in Wuhan, China, of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV2, provided “a unique opportunity to start building out a data set for an emerging infectious disease in real time,” she says. They build mathematical models to predict where disease hotspots are likely to arise. Gardner’s team studies the way population behavior, such as mobility and other factors, influence disease risk. The site which Dong built in just a few hours receives more than a billion hits per day.
It has become a familiar feature on news sites and on TV the world over, tracking the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, deaths, and recoveries globally. That dashboard, like its subject, quickly went viral. On 22 January, he and his thesis advisor in civil and systems engineering Lauren Gardner, who is co-director of the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Hopkins, released an online “dashboard” documenting its spread. A first-year graduate student in civil and systems engineering with a focus on disease epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, Dong began tracking the new disease. In December when the disease that now is known as COVID-19 emerged in China, Ensheng Dong was studying the worrying spread of measles.