John hopkins corona tracker update#

These sources extended to social media, Facebook and Twitter, and news and media announcements in addition to data from international, national, and local health agencies ( 4). The dashboard initially used data from a single Chinese website ( ), but as the pandemic exploded, the team working on the dashboard expanded in order to collate and validate data from a vast and growing number of worldwide sources. While setting up the initial COVID-19 map may have been a relatively simple task for Dong and Gardner, maintaining and updating the resource during a rapidly expanding pandemic turned into a herculean effort.

Maintaining a disease dashboard in a rapidly growing pandemic During this time, it also served as a central data source for the US Department of Health and Human Services. As case counts grew and awareness increased nationally and internationally, traffic to the website continued to surge such that in March 2020 the page attracted more total visits than the websites of the CDC or the New York Times ( 1). When they shared news of the dashboard on social media, word spread rapidly in the research, press, and lay communities, and, by that afternoon, the dashboard had been featured on numerous major news sites. The website went live on January 22, 2022, with the intended audience of the research community - epidemiologists and disease modelers ( 3). At this point, the disease did not even have an official name, but after discussing the issue with Gardner, Dong worked over the course of an afternoon and evening to create the first version of the COVID-19 map, repurposing some of his existing work with Gardner on predicting measles hot spots in the US and utilizing ArcGIS mapping technology ( 1, 2). Gardner at the Center for Systems Science and Engineering, was growing increasingly concerned about first-hand reports from his family concerning the emerging epidemic in China ( 1). In mid-January of 2022, Ensheng “Frank” Dong, a first-year PhD student in Civil and Systems Engineering working with Dr. These systems were not prepared to deliver the frequent updates needed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Biosense platform utilized by the National Syndromic Surveillance Program ( ) is not publicly accessible.

John hopkins corona tracker update#

The CDC’s National Respiratory and Enteric Virus Surveillance System ( ) and FluView ( ) still update only weekly, with frequent revisions after initial postings, and the World Health Organization FluNet ( ) provides updates only biweekly. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, there were no well-publicized resources rapidly updating information about infectious diseases for the public (or scientific community). Due to this volume of labor, and perhaps to the perceived lesser prestige of descriptive analyses relative to analytic epidemiology analyses (which seek to identify risk factors that contribute to our understanding of disease etiology), descriptive epidemiology research is performed primarily by public health agencies and advocacy groups. Although these analyses don’t use complex statistics (often relying simply on counts or percentages), they do involve tremendous effort to acquire and clean the data and to harmonize data across different sources. Descriptive epidemiology is fundamental and describes the distribution of disease across persons, including sociodemographic categories, places, and time.