Pharmacies Map for Facial Mask Purchasing

Mask Map for Taiwan
Mask Map for South Korea
#TaiwanCanHelp

As the outbreak of Covid-19 began, people in Taiwan trying to snap up masks like what you can see in many countries. Taiwan government decided to control the distribution of masks and we could only buy limited number in convenient stores. It caused some confusion. Then the Taiwan government changed the policy that you could only buy masks using real name and in specified pharmacies. The citizen must provide National Health Insurance card to buy just 2 masks each week at the beginning( 3 for each week now ).

To prevent people wasting too much time in looking for masks. The Taiwan government try to release the real time inventory information of masks for each pharmacy. Thanks the NHI system, it provides a stable infrastructure to collect information from 6000+ pharmacies and release it as opendata.

With the opendata, many developers in g0v community tried to build applications to help spreading the information. We finally have 100+ applications to share the information as listed in the HackMD page. What I made is just one of them.

Following the steps of Taiwan, South Korea government also tried to use similar policy and release the opendata. So I tried to develop another one for them using the same code. Just like what Taiwan government did, we are willing to tell the world that #TaiwanCanHelp as Taiwan is always ignored by international organizations like WHO.

steps to use the mask map

By opening the website, the browser will show an alert window to ask permission for the location information from your device. By clicking accept and the map will navigate to your current location, which is marked with a blue circle. Each triangle in the map represents a pharmacy or a place you could buy facial masks. The color of the triangle indicates how many face masks are left. Green means plenty, yellow means some, red means few, and grey means empty. Clicking on the triangle will provide details of the pharmacy/point. At the bottom of the information box, you could find buttons providing navigation services by many vendors. Clicking the button will bring you to each service and it will guide you to the place.

Clicking the gear icon in the sidebar, you could get two drop down lists for provinces and cities. Each time you choose a location, the map will navigate you to the center of that province or city. Once the map is moved, the URL will change according to the center of the map. You could copy the full URL to share the real-time stock information with your friends.

The information is for reference only. The accurate inventory is not guaranteed. But with the map, you could prevent wasting too much time visiting point by point.

For those who is interested in what civic hackers had done related to Covid-19.