Hospital Bed Availability During COVID-19

Hackers

Sidney Knowles (Davidson '23)
Lauren Wong (Vanderbilt '22)
Chanha Kim (Pomona '22)

Description

For our hackathon project, we decided to create user-friendly visualizations for COVID-19-related hospital bed availability data. We collected data using the COVID Act Now API and created visualizations using Microsoft's Power BI platform. Furthermore, we sketched out a skeleton website for what a bare-bones data presentation static HTML page might look like. Our end-products are the Power BI visualizations we created. While we don't have a finished product, we each worked on individual components and learned a lot about the respective technologies we used.

Data Sources

COVID Act Now
National, state, and county level data analysis
Free API
Public Tableau: COVID-19

Microsoft Power BI Visualizations

PowerBI is a business intelligence program.
It’s main purpose is to create interactive visualizations of data.
We specifically chose this program as our user interface because it provides a simple and easy-to-use/understand design.

Hosting Static HTML Pages on GitHub Pages

Our goal in creating a website was to design a user-friendly, human-readable site. To do this, we decided to go with a static site with minimal design. The example in this website is a very simple HTML page with textual headers and footers and a content space for the Power BI visualization. The white-space is there to help the user focus on the visualization. While we don't have a live demo of a static webpage, creating one is simple. All we have to do is create a new 'gh-pages' branch in our host repository and add the HTML/CSS/JS files to that branch. Once we do that, GitHub automatically recognizes the branch and hosts the static webpage for free.