When the previously unknown coronavirus began to spread rapidly around the world at the beginning of 2020, the JHU team decided to create the Coronavirus Resource Center (CRC) in order to monitor the spread of the virus.
A data visualization, a world map, was prepared for the public, on which everyone could see exactly where the coronavirus epidemic had erupted, and how large it had become in the given country. In addition to the map, they also presented, among other things, how many infected people were registered in each country, how many people recovered from the disease, and how many people lost their lives in connection with the coronavirus.
Johns Hopkins University’s solution quickly became a vital tool for governments, policymakers, health leaders and the media as they informed the world about the spread of the virus.
According to JHU data, their map has been viewed more than 2.5 billion times and users have made more than 200 billion data requests over the past three years.
The World Economic Forum highlighted that, although there was agreement that the data used and presented were never completely perfect, the Johns Hopkins University team created a platform that made the spread of the coronavirus visible to the world. This enabled the early detection of new outbreaks, the analysis of short- and long-term trends, and the education of the wider public in the case of the threat posed by the virus.
At the same time, it helped the world’s population to understand the necessity of the strict restrictive measures taken by the governments of individual countries in order to curb the epidemic.
Cover image source: Getty Images
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