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Inspiration
What inspired me to build lovac (stands for lo-cal vac-cination) was the COVID-19 pandemic that we're in. More specifically, the COVID-19 vaccine and the hysteria around it. I realized that people have a lot of misconceptions about a possible COVID-19 vaccine and how it will work. People often don't realize that vaccines only work when enough people take it and it is crucial for us to build Herd Immunity in order for us to protect ourselves and most importantly, the people who are most vulnerable to COVID-19. lovac tries to help people understand how vaccination would work in their city and how they can help.
What it does
lovac is a tool that gives a breakdown on how a COVID-19 vaccine can work in a given city. The user gives the city of their choice and lovac tells them how likely their city is to get an outbreak, gives resources from the CDC to how to protect themselves from COVID-19 and tells them how many people in their city need to get the vaccine for their city to gain Herd Immunity. Moreover, the tool also gives a count of how many people have currently taken or are planning to take the vaccine. This is a crowd sourcing feature and is supposed to give a rough idea of how vaccination is going in their city.
lovac also allows for users to submit their city to the tool if they don't find it, and lovac creates a breakdown for the submitted city for them. Lastly, lovac encourages users to raise awareness about vaccination in their communities and invites them to share lovac on facebook and twitter with #HealthyConversations. The goal is to make everyone use their platform to improve the health of their communities.
How I built it
I built lovac using two popular JavaScript frameworks, express.js and React. I used React to build the client or the frontend of the project and I used express.js to build the api or backend of the project. I used the twitter and facebook APIs to add the sharing integrations.
Challenges I ran into
The biggest challenge that I had was at the start of the project and it was data. lovac would only work if there is sufficient city and community data to help it make predictions and breakdowns for the city. However, finding information on the population and population density of all the cities in the world was very hard. At one point, it was becoming a real blocker for the project and almost made me scrap the idea. However, I was able to find data for U.S. cities and communities, which gave me a good base. After that, I also came up with the idea of crowd sourcing and I was finally able to get around the challenge of building lovac.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I am proud of the way I managed to build the whole application in one weekend. When I started the project, it seemed like such a monumental task and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to complete it all alone. Thankfully, I persevered through and managed to get the app working fairly nicely.
What I learned
Before working on this project, I had not worked with express.js. I always wanted to learn it, but never got around to actually learning it. This project really allowed me to get in express.js and apply it in a real project. Through my research, I also learned a lot more about COVID-19 and Herd Immunity. I also had many misconceptions about COVID-19, Herd Immunity and vaccination. By working on lovac, I've really been able to expand my knowledge on many fronts.
What's next for lovac
I believe that lovac can give a LOT more information to users on vaccination in their city or community. As mentioned before, I was bounded by the data that was available on the internet, and it forced me to focus on specifics. However, there are many other items that can be added to the breakdowns. Information such as places to get tested. places to get vaccinated, announcements by city and much more. I believe that the potential for lovac is endless if the right data is found. So, my next step would be to try and find more data which can help me make lovac better.
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