Waking up to news reports of coronavirus and the increasing numbers of cases are enough to overwhelm any of us. While statistics and fancy charts do provide insights into the situation, they don’t brush away the “it won’t happen to me” syndrome, which unfortunately many of us live in. How do you bring acceptance to this denial, you ask? The myth buster here is to bring out the data which is directly useful and relatable to you. Creating awareness of proximity brings out the reality of the charts. This way information becomes more relatable and makes more sense for an individual.
This is not limited to only spreading awareness. This is helpful if you happen to be on the go. An essential services hero or just stepping out to pick up groceries, with the location information you can avoid going to the risk area and take a safer route to your destination. If you like to play with maps and shapes. It also draws a draggable 500m radius around the location to help in study of the spread and visualising perimeter of high-risk areas.
Where does this data come from? The data fueling this initiative is crowdsourced and is based on publicly available news articles and bulletins published by various government agencies. Anyone is welcome to contribute data. Some of the data points collected are coordinates of location, notes, level of accuracy that can be building, sector, village etc. A verifiable link to the source of this information is mandatory. This helps in keeping away misinformation. Talking about data, you might-just-might be thinking about privacy. True, in some cases, the location is accurate up to a building. Hence extra attention is given to protect privacy of individuals. Any personally identifiable information of a case is stripped before being pushed to the database. The current position of a visitor is also not logged. Rest assured, we are interested in tracking case locations, not you. The number of cases is on the rise. It may be noteworthy to mention here, a marker on the map represents a case location and not the number of cases in that location. Clicking on the marker shows further information like count of patients, source, date and note.
Planet B is work in progress. Joining little efforts goes a long way. We are listening and are open to suggestions. We also intend to add new features. Should anyone have one of those, they can get in touch by feedback form.
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