VaccineBot

VaccineBot

Join the Discord server to test VaccineBot!

Inspiration

Our parents were searching for vaccine centers earlier, and we thought we could make the process faster and easier by creating a Discord Bot that gives important vaccine information and quick vaccine center search.

What it does

The Discord bot has several simple commands that give the user information about different types of Covid-19 vaccines, Covid-19 vaccine and case statistics and information in US states, and a way to search for the nearest vaccine center.

How we built it

We used Python and the discord.py API to create the base bot user, and we used some of the many different features of the discord.py API to create our bot commands and receive neat outputs from the bot in the form of embeds. We used a Python web scraping library to scrape information about three major vaccines from cdc.gov. We used csv files to store data of vaccine distribution statistics in the US and vaccine centers near zip codes and used the pandas library to select what data to find and return from those files. Finally, we used Flask to create a web server for the bot and the Uptime Robot website to constantly ping the bot every 5 minutes so that it always stays online.

Challenges we ran into

We originally wanted to web scrape VaccineFinder.org, but it didn't seem to allow web scraping as we received empty list when using the BeautifulSoup library to pick out certain elements from the html page. We had to find several other sites to work with. One of them had data about vaccinations in US States, but we couldn't figure out how to select the table and create a csv file out of it. We ended up using Google Sheets to create the table, then downloading the file and uploading it to our repl.it program. We had problems reading and returning data from one of the csv files, which we found a work-around for after several attempts. Working with the discord.py API was challenging as well, since neither of us had too much experience with it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that our Discord bot works completely well in its new home, our Covid Vaccine Info community Discord server. We're proud of our ability to combine various programming concepts like hosting a web server, web scraping websites for important information, and locating data in data files to create one amazing bot.

What we learned

We learned a lot about creating Discord bots and using the discord.py API, running a bot through the use of a web server, the specific problems of web scraping and its work-arounds, and new tactics to handle files with lots of data. Overall, this project enhanced and renewed our knowledge in several different fields.

What's next for Vaccine Bot

As for now, Vaccine Bot only provides vaccine locations and search for the United States, and information about the major Covid vaccines in the United States and not other vaccines around the world. We want Vaccine Bot to be able to quickly find nearby vaccine centers for people all around the world, to help the whole world stay safe from the virus. After all, it's a GLOBAL pandemic. We hope to find ways to add that functionality in the future.