https://www.natureindex.com/news-blog/behind-johns-hopkins-university-coronavirus-dashboard
“It was a bit of a spur-of-the-moment decision to say, let's build out this data set and let's keep doing it, let's make it public. And let's go ahead and visualize it while we're at it. And [we] built a dashboard that night.”
“It was a bit of a spur-of-the-moment decision to say, let's build out this data set and let's keep doing it, let's make it public. And let's go ahead and visualize it while we're at it. And [we] built a dashboard that night.”
The intended audience, Gardner notes, was the research community - other epidemiologists and disease modelers, for instance. But the whole world took notice. The map receives more than a billion interactions a day - a number that includes both people visualizing the map and those who are mining the underlying data, Gardner says.
The team had anticipated the numbers would be more in the order of hundreds or thousands. “I think both of us were just pretty surprised with the general public interest.”