COVID-19 World Spread (In 1 Minute) Animation

COVID-19 World Spread (3/29/20)

Inspiration

I was inspired to apply my engineering skillset in creating a tool that will help people to understand the severity of COVID-19 and the importance of enacting stringent prevention measures. I sought to create a tool that was very dynamic and that could be used to present an easy to understand visual for all types of people. It is very important that we educate the world about the seriousness of this virus. This could quite possibly be one of the deadliest viruses our world has ever faced.

What it does

My code receives case data from the Humanitarian Data Exchange and processes it. The number of cases over time is plotted on a geobubble plot for each country. In addition, a line plot displays the number of cases in the ten countries with the most cases. This is then stored as an animated movie that displays how COVID-19 has spread over the last 2 months.

How I built it

I built this code in MATLAB, inspired the work of a few different users. The code relies on a lot of data processing algorithms to organize and successfully plot the data. The data is obtained from the Humanitarian Data Exchange and receives up to date from health agencies across the globe. Using built-in MATLAB functions, I was able to process the data and build very visually appealing figures.

Challenges I ran into

It was challenging learning how to correctly obtain and process the data over the web. Additionally, correctly saving and formatting the animation as a playable video file was quite difficult at first.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am really proud that I was able to get this project to work and have a result that can be used to explain the seriousness of this situation to people. I have received a lot of great feedback from my peers and I think that this is a really useful educational tool.

What I learned

I learned that it is very possible to turn a bright idea that you have into a tangible project. In times of great need, the human mind works in incredible ways. I was able to turn my idea into a product in a matter of days and to me, that is quite an incredible feeling.