Massachusetts COVID -19 Dashboard

Massachusetts publishes a lot of raw COVID data. However, raw data is difficult to look at, therefore, I built a website with interactive visualizations of the data.

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Inspiration

The COVID-19 pandemic is still a big problem in the World. To help my local community of Worcester and Massachusetts, I decided to build a vaccine dashboard with an API that allows us to see the different statistics of COVID -19 with beautiful, interactive, and informative data visualizations.

What it does

The Dashboard allows you to see all the current cases of Massachusetts that are updated in real-time by a custom-built API that downloads data every week from the Massachusett.gov website and publishes it to a database in Google Firebase. I built a middleware using Google Cloud Functions so that this API is then queried by my application to get all the data for the state by month, race, age, county, and town. People can see how many cases of coronavirus have happened over time using the interactive bar chart. It also allows you to see the different cases by race and age. This data is important as it can highlight trends of discrimination and more against COVID-19. Moreover, people can search their county and town to see their local COVID-19 cases in MA.

How I built it

I used a Node.js backend that runs on my AWS EC2 Machine that downloads the data from the Mass website and publishes it to the Google Firebase database. I used React and D3 for the front-end component of the website and different react libraries to help with the needed functionalities. The website is then published on github hosting for the world to access using https.

Challenges I ran into

There were a lot of times I had to clean up the data given. This consumed a lot of time, however, the API is now robust and can query a lot of specific data using Google Cloud Functions.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The automatic API and the visually appealing and informative visualizations help people stay protected.

What I learned

I learned a lot about React and D3. I already had some experience with them, but there were still gaps in my knowledge that this hackathon helped with.

What's next for Massachusetts COVID -19 Dashboard

Building the Vaccine Dashboard, I have the vaccine data available on my API, but I was not able to implement the front-end for the application. After some more time, I should be able to implement this to the application. It is critical that people know about the availability of vaccines so I will put more effort after this hackathon to make that information available.

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