MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
For the latest COVID-19 statistics updated in nearly real time, millions of people around the world are turning to an interactive web-based dashboard. It was created by a small team at Johns Hopkins University. And as NPR's Melissa Block reports, from its humble beginnings, that dashboard has become one of the most authoritative sources for the latest coronavirus numbers and trends.
MELISSA BLOCK, BYLINE: The project was born - as these things often are - under the influence of caffeine.
LAUREN GARDNER: We were sitting around a table. We were all drinking lattes.
BLOCK: This was back on January 21. Lauren Gardner, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins, had been paying close attention to early reports of a deadly new virus spreading in China. That's her specialty - modeling the spread of infectious disease. And over that coffee, she asked her Ph.D. student Ensheng Dong if he'd been following news of the coronavirus.
ENSHENG DONG: And I said, yes, I know that. And I really worry about my family over there.
BLOCK: Dong is from Shanxi province in China. He knew there were confirmed cases in his hometown. Well, professor Gardner had an idea.
DONG: And she mentioned, why don't we make a dashboard? I'm thinking, yes, why not?
BLOCK: So Dong got busy. And by that same night, he had created a dashboard of coronavirus cases. Back then, his map showed just a smattering of red circles, indicating a grand total of 320 confirmed cases, all but a handful in China. Over the months, as the epidemic turned into a pandemic and as the number of confirmed cases has grown from several hundred to nearly 2 million, Dong has watched those red circles on the map spread steadily and fast all over the globe.
DONG: It's kind of a bloody map. There's so many red dots everywhere.
BLOCK: In the beginning, Dong was entering all the data by himself, manually plugging the numbers of confirmed cases, recoveries and deaths into the dashboard, which quickly turned into a monumental task. Now nearly all the data is entered automatically. The dashboard filled an information vacuum. As it grew more popular, demand was so heavy that the servers crashed.
DONG: Actually, if I ever knew that this project would go such big, maybe I would reconsidering to do that.
GARDNER: I didn't envision being dashboard person, that's for sure (laughter).
BLOCK: But that's what Gardner is doing, managing the dashboard for the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering, a task that's become all-consuming.
GARDNER: I think what we massively underestimated was the general public's interest. People are just really desperate for information that they trust.
BLOCK: The Hopkins dashboard team scrapes their numbers from dozens of sources, including the CDC and World Health Organization, also state and local health authorities and media aggregating websites. The team has grown from two to a couple dozen, and they're always looking for new features.
GARDNER: OK. Let's resize the bubbles for the mortality rate.
DONG: I'll do that right now.
BLOCK: Last week, a few team members gathered around a table, socially distancing with bottles of hand sanitizer nearby. They were puzzling through additions to the map, like mortality rates and testing data.
GARDNER: Do you have any idea how to put them on the same web map? 'Cause I like that idea, but I...
BLOCK: Their COVID-19 dashboard is open source, made freely available. Thousands of other dashboards, including NPR's, pull the Hopkins data into their own.
GARDNER: And I think that's awesome.
BLOCK: Beyond the snapshot of what's happening now, Gardner says the data are being used to drive state and federal policy.
GARDNER: We're absolutely doing short-term forecasting, looking at, what are the next spatial hotspots? Where should we be allocating resources to try to better prepare for the next city or the next state that's going to see a surge in cases?
BLOCK: And they just joined a study from NASA modeling how climate and seasonality are contributing to the COVID outbreak. As the project goes on, grad student Ensheng Dong says what started with him worrying about his family in China has flipped. Now with the U.S. bearing the brutal brunt of the pandemic, he says it's his family's turn to worry about him.
Melissa Block, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
