17-year-old creates world’s biggest online coronavirus tracker

High school student develops one of the largest coronavirus tracking websites in the world

17-year-old high school student, Avi Schiffmann has created the world’s biggest coronavirus tracker.

The website provides information on the constantly changing numbers of confirmed cases, deaths and recoveries caused by the coronavirus across the world.

Schiffmann is a self-taught coder and launched his website in late December last year when coronavirus had not yet been reported outside of China. The website, nCoV2019.live has been visited over 350 million times.

After noticing how incredibly difficult it was initially to track coronavirus cases, because people were mostly dependent on Chinese government websites, Schiffmann decided to create his own tracker.



“When I started this website, there were less than 1,000 total cases, they were all in the Wuhan area of China, and there was a lot of misinformation spreading. So I decided it would be cool to create a website and make it a central hub of information,” says Schiffmann while speaking to Democracy Now.

In addition to this, the site features maps and information on the disease with the option of subscribing to a newsletter that gives you daily updates.

 

These graphs are gonna be really cool I have soooo much data. 📈

Also about the ages of the deceased, im not sure how much data of individual patients are released due to things like hippa laws, if anyone has sources/data send it over

— avischiffmann (@AviSchiffmann) March 18, 2020

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“The main goal of (the website) was to provide an easy way to see the straight facts and the data, without having to make a website that was biased or full of ads. You shouldn’t have to go through government websites to download a daily PDF that’s probably out of date by the time you read it and have to go through all kinds of complicated things just to see the straight facts,” he said.

The information on the website has been accumulated from the World Health Organisation, the Centers for Disease Control to provide authentic and updated numbers on the pandemic.