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Will Kirk / JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
Lauren Gardner orders the Johns Hopkins University portal, which displays covid-19 data worldwide
With 1 billion visits per day, a website run by an American scientist has quickly become the most authoritative source for monitoring the coronavirus worldwide.
The Johns Hopkins University website, in the United States, shows the number of confirmed cases, deaths and survivors in all countries of the world and has now been used by the media and even governments to monitor the evolution of the pandemic .
Other sites available to access are the WHO and the Wordometer platform, as this report by BBC News Brazil showed.
In front of the Johns Hopkins University portal is the American Lauren Gardner, co-director of the institution’s Center for Science and Systems Engineering. Previously, he worked on spatial modeling of the measles and Zika epidemics.
‘Millions of eyes at the same time’
In an interview with the American website ScienceInsider, Gardner said that the idea to create the site came up in January, when the outbreak began to spread in China: The first coronavirus death occurred in Wuhan on January 11.
“My graduate student Ensheng Dong, who is Chinese, was personally interested. In a few hours, we built the original panel. And the next day [22 de janeiro] I shared on Twitter and the site went viral, “he told ScienceInsider.
According to Gardner, the site automatically aggregates information from different sources and is updated hourly. Care is also taken to avoid double counting of cases.
“There are millions of eyes on it all the time. We get thousands of emails,” he explains.
“We now also have an anomaly detection system that alerts us to discrepancies in the case reports we automatically collect,” he adds.
Gardner says the site started with “about six people” and that he initially had internal support from the university.
“We were blowing up Amazon’s servers with all the demand. Now, the Applied Physics Laboratory [na Hopkins] Helps with curatorship and background data technology. Esri, the company that owns the mapping software, helps manage the platform. Hopkins employees manage the media and communications. But the group is still much smaller than it should be for what we are doing, “he says.
Although manual labor is less, once the site is automated, it is “exhausting,” says the researcher.
“For more than two months, we were trying to make decisions about where to collect data, what data was reliable, how to aggregate it, validate it. Initially, we did everything manually. Now, almost everything is automated with multiple cross-checks,” he explains.
“The panel updates automatically every hour. We are also on a 24 hour rotating shift for issues like server and data curation. For example, we have a PhD student who lives in England and starts our shift in the morning (for example cause of the spindle) “, he adds.
“It’s a huge volunteer-based public service effort. We’re just doing everything we can to make it the best it can be, but we know it’s not perfect.”
Despite this effort, the site was involved in a controversy: it identified Taiwan as Taiwan (China regards the country as a rebellious province) and initially located confirmed cases of coronavirus inside the Diamond Princess luxury cruise ship, which was quarantined in Japan. , in the middle of the United States
“The geopolitical implications have been stressful and disturbing. I just want to report on the data that will be most useful and appropriate for people who are trying to access it. The virus doesn’t care about borders,” he says.
According to Gardner, with complete site automation, she and her team are focused on doing other types of research.
“Almost 90% of my interests and efforts are focused on mathematical models around this disease. We are doing a real-time risk assessment of what is happening in the United States, with the aim of providing these results to those responsible of public policies. ” He says.
Gardner says he believes the work will continue “for at least a few more months.”
“We have been doing this since January. We left the rest of the lab. And it will probably be like this for at least a few more months. And I think we will continue the outbreak for a year. So we are trying 110%, for sure,” he concludes.
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