COVID Central

A Nationalized Database with Testing, Blood Plasma Donation, and Food Bank Centers

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Mission Statement

Our mission statement is to “address a critical lack in user accessibility to key COVID-19 information such as localized data and a variety of centers (e.g. testing, blood plasma donation, food distribution) by serving as a comprehensive, feature-packed, all-in-one database.”

What it does

We are a team of Long Island high school students who created a non-profit website service called COVID Central (www.covidcentral.org) that serves as an up-to-date, centralized database featuring over 4,300 COVID-19 testing locations available across the country — information that to this day has still not been consolidated on an intuitive and localized level by government institutions such as the CDC, NIH, and WHO for the general public.

How we built it

I was able to further hone my computer science skills through this project, and I think that to date, this is the biggest project that I’ve created. I’ll just give a brief overview on how the website was created: the website was built using Python as the backend and HTML, CSS, and Javascript as the front end. Some notable packages we used were Flask, which was the main framework that we used to build the website. To retrieve local Covid-19 data, we used the John Hopkins University CSSE dataset. The user inputs a form with their zip code, which is converted into fips code as an index to retrieve data from their csv file. The map was implemented using mapbox, and all our testing center points were stored as a GEOJSON file. Initially, we had difficulties with our map lagging because of too many testing center points so we decided to cluster the points to improve speed and usability.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We are proud to say that anyone - even high school students can make a difference. This shows the power of technology and how powerful it is to impact change. You, yes you, can make a diffference!

What's next for COVID Central

There are a couple of ways that we are going to improve COVID Central. We want to add more data for the website, such as blood plasma sites, food banks, and vaccination sites (when they pop up). This will keep all the data in one centralized location, so that people can access it easily. Also, we want to add crowdsourcing, so as the number of people that visit our website increases we can ask them for feedback to add/edit/delete testing centers. Depending on how the website will grow, we will partner with hospitals, so that they can online check in through our website, so that when the patient gets there they don’t have to fill out any paperwork and don't have to wait.

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