A Johns Hopkins-made map is tracking the spread of coronavirus

BALTIMORE – We’re “digging deeper” into American academia this week, visiting Johns Hopkins University with our son, who will attend JHU’s Whiting School of Engineering this fall.

It’s been “an excellent adventure” for parents, not just students. As an example, we’re learning more about an online “dashboard” built by a team at the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Whiting to track the spread of the coronavirus around the world.

The map is publicly available at the following links:

• Desktop version
• Mobile version

I first read about the project in The Hub, JHU’s news service. (I’m now reading The Hub and The Baltimore Sun — “when in Rome do as the Romans do”). The media has been turning to JHU for information about the coronavirus just as it turns to Caltech’s Seismological Laboratory for details about earthquakes.

Media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, PBS News Hour, ABC News and others all have cited the dashboard in their reporting about the coronavirus outbreak.

“We built this dashboard because we think it is important for the public to have an understanding of the outbreak situation as it unfolds with transparent data sources,” Laura Gardner, a civil engineering professor and CSSE’s co-director, told The Hub. “For the research community, this data will become more valuable as we continue to collect it over time.”

The statistics behind the data visualization are being collected from the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China, and Dingxiangyuan, a social networking site for health care professionals that provides real-time information on cases.

The CSSE website provides a link to a “downloadable Google Sheet that contains information on confirmed and suspected cases in more than 30 Chinese locations as well as for the nations of Japan, Thailand, South Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, Colombia, Brazil, Australia, Mexico, and the United States,” according to The Hub.

“Last year Gardner and a team of researchers identified 25 U.S. counties that were most likely to experience measles outbreaks in 2019,” The Hub concluded. “The predictive analysis, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, was based on international air travel volume, non-medical exemptions from childhood vaccinations, population data, and reported measles outbreak information.”