Map Tracks Coronavirus Outbreak In Near Real Time

An online dashboard for tracking the worldwide spread of the coronavirus outbreak that began in the Chinese city of Wuhan has been built.
An online dashboard for tracking the worldwide spread of the coronavirus outbreak that began in the Chinese city of Wuhan has been built.

Map Tracks Coronavirus Outbreak In Near Real Time

The Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering nhas built and is regularly updating an online dashboard for tracking the worldwide spread of the coronavirus outbreak that began in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

Lauren Gardner, a civil engineering professor and CSSE’s co-director,

spearheaded the effort to launch the mapping website.

The site displays statistics about deaths and confirmed cases of coronavirus, or 2019-nCoV, across a worldwide map.

It also allows visitors to down- load the data for free. “We built this dashboard because we think it is important for the public to have an understanding of the outbreak situation as it unfolds with transparent data sources,” Gardner said. “For the research community, this data will become more valuable as we continue to collect it over time.”

Making the data available for download is “critical” for researchers, she added. Th e map is publicly available at the following links:

  • Desktop version

  • Mobile version

The statistics behind the datavisualization are being collected from the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China, and Dingxiangyuan, a social networking site for health care professionals that provides real-time information on cases.

Gardner said “local level case data” from Dingxiangyuan, media reports,

and the local CDC “can provide more timely assessments of the out-break, compared to the national level reporting organizations, which take longer to filter up.”

Media outlets including News week, PBS News Hour, and ABC News have cited the dashboard in their reporting about the outbreak.

The website provides a link to a downloadable Google Sheet that contains information on confirmed and suspected cases in more than 30 Chinese locations as well as for the nations of Japan, Thailand, South Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, Colombia, Brazil, Australia, Mexico, and the United States.

The CSSE website does not yet predict where the fl u-like virus is likely to spread.

Last year Gardner and a team of researchers identified 25 U.S. counties that were most likely to experience measles outbreaks in 2019.

The predictive analysis, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, was

based on international air travel volume, non-medical exemptions from childhood vaccinations, population data, and reported measles outbreak

information.

The link to the full dashboard can be found here: https://gisanddata.

maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdash- board/index.html#/bda7594740fd-

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