There could have been absolutely no one who deserved this more this year. As the Center for Systems Science and Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, walked away – figuratively speaking – with the Making A Difference Award at ESRI UC 2020, social media erupted in applause.
Johns Hopkins University’s and COVID dashboard have become almost synonymous now with Center’s Coronavirus Resource Centre dashboard becoming the global reference for the COVID-19 pandemic. The map, which uses Esri technology, is maintained in near real time throughout the day through a combination of manual and automated updating.
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How was it conceived?
As the outbreak grew into an epidemic and fears of its global spread began to be considered seriously, a team led by Dr. Lauren Gardner, epidemiologist and co-director of the center, created the dashboard with her graduate student Ensheng Dong.
It was launched on January 22, the same day the WHO mission to Wuhan issued a statement saying that evidence suggested human-to-human transmission of the new virus in Wuhan but that more investigation was needed to understand the full extent of transmission.
On January 21, Professor Gardner was first proposed the idea by Dong, who had been hearing from his relatives in China about a new virus outbreak disrupting their lives since December. The duo worked through the night to finish it and published on January 22 with only 320 reported cases mostly in China, the rest in Thailand, Japan and South Korea at that time. That day itself, the US reported its first confirmed case of the novel coronavirus. This was the first case in the WHO Region of the Americas.
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About the dashboard
We are tracking the 2019-nCoV spread in real-time. Cases and locations can be viewed here; data available for download. #nCoV2019 @JHUSystems https://t.co/qfVymyUf7v pic.twitter.com/SS9zUwrQxT
— Lauren Gardner (@TexasDownUnder) January 22, 2020
Today, the dashboard is a powerful real-time tool to monitor and respond to the pandemic. As Jack Dangermond stated while announcing the ESRI awards on Monday, the Center has made some billions maps so far and hosts three to five billion interactions daily including data downloads.
The data sources for the dashboard include the World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, the National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China, 1point3acres, Worldometers.info, BNO, state and national government health departments, local media reports, and the DXY, one of the world’s largest online communities for physicians, health care professionals, pharmacies and facilities.
The dashboard was developed to provide researchers, public health authorities, and the general public with a user-friendly tool to track the outbreak as it unfolds, Prof Gardner stated in a paper published in Lancet in March. All data collected and displayed are made freely available, initially through Google Sheets and now through a GitHub repository, along with the feature layers of the dashboard, which are now included in the Esri Living Atlas.
All points shown on the map are based on geographic centroids, and are not representative of a specific address, building or any location. Any government agency may use the data for its purposes as long as it provides credit. All data, mapping and analysis is otherwise provided to the public for educational and academic research purposes.
It is maintained at the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at the Whiting School of Engineering, with technical support from Esri and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
Dr Gardner is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. She leads interdisciplinary research efforts on the topic of bio-secure mobility, which utilizes network optimization and mathematical modeling to improve our understanding of disease spreading patterns and risk as a function of transportation systems, land use, climate and population demographics. She is also a member of the Infectious Disease Dynamics (IDD) Group in Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
