COVID-19 Vaccine Waste Tracker

The CDC is unable to accurately track how many COVID-19 vaccines go to waste everyday. We want to be the solution.

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Inspiration

We wanted to create a tool to help hospitals and other COVID-19 vaccine distribution centers to record and report vaccines that are wasted. The CDC reports that many vaccines are going to waste, but there is no concerted effort to track all of this waste.

What it does

We built a dashboard to display wasted vaccines over time and by location. Hospitals and distribution centers can also report their wasted vaccines. One way this dashboard is useful is that it can help legislators make informed decisions about vaccine distribution.

How we built it

Our original idea was to create a dashboard as well as connect patients with surplus vaccines before they went to waste. However, we quickly realized that we would not have time to implement both sides, so we chose to focus on the administrative side. This was much more manageable so we went on to build a React frontend, a Spring boot API, and a MySQL database.

Challenges we ran into

  • None of our team members have ever built anything like this before
  • The initial idea was too big to implement so we went through various stages of restructuring
  • Physical storage limitations
  • Every member worked with a framework/technology that they were not familiar with before this weekend
  • The problem we are solving is due to the lack of data, so we didn't have realistic data to go off of

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Having something to show at the end
  • The database updates when a user enter data
  • Connecting our frontend, backend, and database
  • Working well with new people

What we learned

  • New frameworks/tech (Spring boot, React, MySQL)
  • Gained insight into full stack development
  • Using Git/GitHub with multiple branches!
  • Project ideation, formation, and management

What's next for COVID-19 Vaccine Waste Tracker

There are definitely a lot of features we would have loved to implement with more time. Tracking which types of vaccines were wasted, creating a way for hospitals to log vaccines that are about to expire to connect to a public facing notification system where people can sign up to receive vaccines that would otherwise go bad, more ways to display the data (in a map, adding different filter metrics to the graph and table), and hosting the dashboard publicly.

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