Johns Hopkins launch their coronavirus tracking dashboard

Ensheng Dong, a Johns Hopkins PhD student from China, created the JH online coronavirus tracking dashboard “to collect data to show the public”. [1]

After 12 hours of collecting and translating Chinese data, designing tables and “bulldozed the statistics into a program that would create a map”, the next morning on January 22, 2020 he showed his his supervisor, associate professor Lauren Gardner. “After a few tweaks, the project went live, with red dots ballooning across countries…to show numbers of known cases” and deaths.

The Coronavirus Resource Center “rapidly becomes a premier source around the world for real-time, accurate data about the pandemic. Its dashboard, created by Whiting School of Engineering civil and systems engineering associate professor Lauren Gardner and others, has been viewed more than 1 billion times.”