Corona Daily 469: Story of a Dashboard

With 1.2 billion hits a day, the Johns Hopkins Covid-19 dashboard is anxiously looked at in ordinary houses as well as the White House. When a pandemic begins, who commissions such a daily count? Who called the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) with this request?

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In December 2019, Frank, a first year PhD student at JHU was studying the spread of measles. He and his guide Lauren Gardner were thinking of putting the measles hotspots on the map. Gardner’s team studies population mobility and behavior (such as whether people are obeying or breaking social distancing) to assess the transmission risk. Based on that, the team builds mathematical models to predict disease hotspots.

While working on measles, Frank heard of the Pneumonia virus outbreak in Wuhan. China had started generating daily statistics. Why not translate that data into an interactive visual map, thought Frank. He began to work on the spur of the moment, and the map was created that same night.   

At the time, it was meant as a China dashboard. In the first few weeks, Frank referred to the numbers as those inside China and those outside. One day, he noticed the non-China numbers were bigger, the World map was redder.

On 22 Jan. the dashboard was made available online for other researchers. (Why would anybody outside the academic world want to look at a virus dashboard?) Frank published an academic paper on his dashboard on 19 Feb.

Then suddenly life began to change. It is a researcher’s fantasy to get 1000 online visitors for his academic product. It’s his dream to get his paper cited 2-3 times in the first few months.

Frank’s dashboard paper was cited 80 times in the first month. The Dashboard went viral logarithmically. The visitor count was in millions. The team needed to be expanded to five people. They moved to the conference room to maintain social distancing. Manual input of data became unsustainable. Automated web-scraping and aggregation were introduced to have real-time numbers. The team was working 24 hours, and their data was ahead of even the WHO, except once when a researcher overslept. While they were still in a state of shock, their daily hits reached 1.2 billion.

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Nobody commissioned the dashboard. We wrongly assume the world to be well organized. In most matters, no system exists. You and I can start creating such a dashboard, or our own analysis.

One reason why this particular dashboard happened was Frank. Chinese students studying in the USA adopt English names for the convenience of Westerners. Frank’s real name is Ensheng Dong. His family lives in China, he has several friends in Wuhan. If not for the personal bond, it’s unlikely this dashboard would be born.

Ravi