A little app we built this weekend to track the coronavirus

I'm obviously biased, but I think ours is orders of magnitude better:

• It's mobile-friendly.
• Every single one of our charts (and the whole map) have their own embed code.
• We have a lot more types of charts available
• The data is more frequently updated
• We have a much prettier URL :)

Should there be another outbreak tomorrow, I could have another separate entity of that up and running in ~15 minutes. Maybe a little longer if I need to buy a new domain name and wait for the SSL certificate to be ready.

Hey Trent, thanks for the comments! The two are actually deliberate choices. We could go with a higher map quality, but then the loading time would increase. So all in all, it seemed like the right compromise. As for the bar graph, we purposely went with a logarithmic scale rather than a linear one. Given that right now, the toll is 99% China and the rest is spread across a dozen countries or so, with a linear scale, you would just see one long China bar, and the others would be so tiny you couldn't click on them. We tried pie charts and a bunch of other visualizations, but no, really that's the only that seemed to make sense. If you have another idea, would love to explore it, though!

There was literally 72 hours between the moment we had the idea and the moment we launched the tool, so you probably don't want to do that: the code is a mess. That being said, I'd be happy to answer any questions you have!

We're actually using multiple sources, including a few official Chinese sites and we're constantly fetching the news for updates about the numbers in other countries.

You were right. It got picked up. Here is an article by Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/wuhan-coronavirus-app-where-is-how-dangerous-number-infections-2020-1

Thanks for the tip. Sounds good. Got any email addresses to share?

Yeah, that's a fair point. It's extremely likely the fatality rate will be much higher. We also don't know how reliable the data given by China is. It's very possible they haven't reported all deaths that occurred. We are doing the best we can with the data that's available. Will probably add a little info bubble somewhere to point out that the fatality rate is temporary and likely to increase.

At this point, there is no central place where we can get the data, so we have to manually update it with the latest data from governments and news. But it's safe to say it will be updated every 6 hours at most (but often more frequently).

We're using Firebase to host and serve all the assets, with Node.js on the server. And the front-end is just vanilla Javascript with a couple of plugins (Chart.js for the charts and OpenLayers for the map)