Water Watcher COVID-19

Do your neighbors have COVID? With Water Watcher COVID-19, you can sign up for emails to notify you of the COVID risk rate in your county according to data from nearby wastewater plants.

Comment

Inspiration

Three years ago, SCU sent students home from campus with an expected return of two weeks. The return date soon changed to one month and then 6 months and then 1 year. Students were not able to fully return to class in-person until over 1 year after they were sent home. It is clear that COVID is not going away anytime soon and we need to learn how to live with it.

What it does

Wastewater plants can now detect for COVID in your waste. With Water Watcher COVID-19, you can sign up for email notifications that notify you of the COVID risk rate in your county. We also created an interactive website. Users can select a county from a map. A graph is then presented below the map with information about the COVID levels based on all of the wastewater treatment plants in the county.

How we built it

We used a dataset from the CDC that includes information about the sample location, sample collection date, COVID level percentile, and more. Using this, we created a map that colors counties based on high, medium, or low COVID levels. To create the email notification, we used a combination of google-cloud API and HTML. Together, we were able to create a message that shares information about the COVID levels in the user's county and guidelines recommended by the CDC.

Challenges we ran into

It was difficult for us to set up an email template to send out. We wanted to send more than just a block of text. And so, we decided to use HTML, beyond the ways we used it in our website, to format information about a user's county in a presentable way.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were so excited when we sent out our first test email. It's thrilling to see the things we work for come together. It feels so great to have created something that can benefit so many people in such a short amount of time.

What we learned

We were most surprised to learn that COVID-19 can be detected from wastewater. We also learned a lot about working with github, as this what we used to create and code our project. Some other new skills we gained include flask, hosting servers, and DeckGL.

What's next for Water Watcher COVID-19

Our current version only contains data for the counties in California. We plan to expand this dataset to include the rest of the United States and even other countries, if the proper data exists.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates