Vaccine-19

Inspiration and what it does

Ever since the breakout of the Covid-19 virus, everyone has had their eyes on the distribution of a vaccine. Great minds in the world of biology have worked to provide us with a vaccine in a very short amount of time. Unfortunately, the time the effort they went through to ensure quick access to a vaccine could be thwarted by a slow distribution infrastructure. Our team wanted to tackle this project and ensure that the kids of the community will be able to go outside and play, the elderly can interact with others without having to fear for their safety, and so we software developers can get to see the sun again (not that we went outside much in the first place). We decided to tackle this problem and create an app that requests user data such as job type, location, and age. This information will then be utilized by an algorithm we created in order to create a heatmap of the most essential placement points of distribution centres. The government can utilize this information in order to plan the locations of distribution facilities ensuring that the areas that need vaccines most, will receive it first. Another problem we had seen complaints about were buggy and slow apps for the sign up for vaccines. This is a significant issue for the elderly population, who are not well versed with complicated applications. They are also at high risk from Covid-19 and are a priority for early vaccinations. With the use of our app, we implemented scheduling and smooth UI for simplistic vaccine distribution. This will give the elderly population easier access to the vaccine as well as immediate scheduling to take the vaccine once centres restock. Our data collected paired with our algorithm will allow us to identify citizens facing the highest risk and ensure that they are given early access to vaccines.

How we built it

We used Node, Express, PostgreSQL and CockroachDB to build the backend. This is where we hosted our algorithms and had our user database information. Our front end was done with React, CSS and HTML. This would serve as the source for the information, as well as the recipient of the data we compile.

Challenges we ran into

One of the major challenges we faced was version controls and merging our files. Due to miscommunications within team members, some files were overwritten and some functionality was lost. This caused us to have to work backwards and trace our steps back to recover information. We had to carefully stitch together the files and account for all the variables in order to retain the functionality that both team members had been working on. To prevent this problem from happening again we ensured that we were openly communicating about files and tasks we were working to accomplish.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud to say that we were able to complete the problem we set out to solve within twelve hours. The applications of this project can go a long way in ensuring that the impacts of Covid-19 are kept to a minimum and lives can actually be saved by making sure those at risk at getting the vaccines first.

What we learned

Our team managed to learn countless different things over the course of this project. This includes using new tools such as the Leaflet library that allowed us to create the heatmap and CockroachDB which was a programming language we hadn’t experimented with before. We also learned about how vital it is that vaccines are distributed properly. Reading about how rollouts went in the states, it was devastating to learn that countless vaccines were just sitting in storerooms and how far frontline workers had to travel just to get vaccinated. On a lighter note, we also learned numerous new things in the fun activities and lectures that HTN had to offer. We learned about other like-minded students in the “Meet up lounge”, got mentored by experts in the field and got to learn fun trivia in the activity rooms.

What's next for Vaccine-19

There’s so much more that we want to do with Vaccine-19. The first thing that comes to mind is improving on our algorithm. We want to work with experts in the field of biology to help us better identify the citizens most at risk of the virus. We also want to be able to provide data about where to put distribution centres given the number of facilities the government can afford to use. We want to feed our algorithm a vast amount of information, such as hospital sizes, road infrastructure nearby and much more. This is just the beginning of Vaccine-19, and we can’t wait to see what we’ll be able to accomplish in the future.