COVID-19 Real Time Updates with Credible Sources

1Point3Acres COVID-19 Tracker Screenshot 1
1Point3Acres COVID-19 Tracker Screenshot 2
1Point3Acres COVID-19 Tracker Screenshot 3
1Point3Acres COVID-19 Tracker Screenshot 4
1Point3Acres COVID-19 Tracker Screenshot 5

Inspiration

What it does

How we built it

See our co-founder's story on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6642161036537532416/

Wuhan, China, my hometown, has been fighting the coronavirus/covid19 epidemic since January. My large extended family and many of my childhood friends are still under mandatory lockdown . I have just lost an uncle to this disease in February. While I could not do anything for them on the ground, I really wanted to help in some way.

Here's how: We hope to bring more transparency to the public and increase awareness about this global epidemic. So we built a real time tracker for US and Canada (https://lnkd.in/gZcpYFb), by burning some midnight (and weekend) oil. We have received 10 million visits in the last 7 days , and tons of positive feedback from online communities. (https://lnkd.in/gZbJ-J3) [update: will surpass 100M visits around 03/29]

We'd like to thank the engineers from 1Point3Acres on this extended hackathon, the group of volunteers fact checking day and night to bring accurate information, and the huge community of supporters giving us feedback, news leads, and cups of boba tea.

We will keep up the effort. Please support us by sharing with your friends. While building it has been a good journey, we hope the covid19 (now) #pandemic ends soon and our tracker stops incrementing.

Challenges we ran into

Fast iterations to keep releasing new features.

Devops to enable data operations team to collaborate remotely, move fast while keep the data accurate.

Scaling problems: we have to keep IT infra cost low under high traffic, which will break 100M visit very soon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Many people speak highly of our tracker and they think it's very useful!

They shared our tracker with many colleagues, friends and neighbors.

They also share it on twitters, facebook, and reddit.

Please note that there is not a single source of truth from the government when reporting critical data to the public.

Also we don't just call other website's data to display it. We built a team of volunteers to aggregate various data sources, including government websites and news reports, and manually curate data. Therefore, we are recognized as one of the providers of coronavirus data in North America.

CDC Deputy Branch Chief liked us under our co-founder's Linkedin story:

Thank you 1point3[acres] for this outstanding resource of information. We (CDC) use it daily and have found it to be a very reliable and current resource. We sincerely appreciate the work you are putting into this to support our country in the fight against COVID-19!

Link: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6642161036537532416/?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28activity%3A6642161036537532416%2C6648851561869045760%29

When Jeff Wiener, CEO@Linkedin, mentioned he's looking for coronavirus dataset. Many people recommended us. Just count how many people liked us there at https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeffweiner08_appreciate-the-work-orgs-like-johns-hopkins-activity-6649062907348819968-TTyB