A combined effort
Maps can guide us through previously unknown territory. Explorers track routes over mountains, rivers and lakes, the obstacles of the physical world. A group of students have come up with a map of the health world, charting and exploring the direction of the COVID-19 outbreak. Their work, the nCoV-outbreak map, shows the direction of travel of the virus and hopefully its end destination.
Although all the volunteers have been working together for more than two months, they still don’t know much about each other. What links them is the invisible airwaves. What gathers them is the passion they share for contributing to society.
Since late January, nearly 200 team members from varied educational backgrounds, without physically meeting each other, have set up a map that illustrates the global path of the novel coronavirus, with an up-to-date pandemic database and data analyses.
The team has provided information and statistics to more than 30 research groups, mostly from Peking University, the National University of Defense Technology, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and other universities and institutions in China.
What inspired these volunteer team members to gather together virtually in pursuit of the same goal is Chen Chunyu’s attempt to trace the virus growth.
Chen, 20, a sophomore from the School of Life Sciences at Tsinghua University, started to collect reliable data from mainstream media reports and official websites of health departments in China on Jan 20.
Based on that data, the next day he released a map dashboard that provided daily-updated information about all confirmed cases of COVID-19. This soon garnered millions of views online.
At first, Chen confesses, like many people, he had been in a state of distress as the devastating disease spread quickly. Later, he realized that he could do something to contribute to fighting the virus.
Chen noticed that most of the
“virus maps” he saw in the media were not in the form of a real map, and failed to clarify the growth, or showed all of the factors that affect the spread of the epidemic in a scientific and comprehensive way, he says.
“I wanted to create a map that helps people better understand the severity of the pandemic and its growth trend,” Chen says.
He started by producing the map for China, and recently the team extended the map to encompass a global projection.
Initially, to track more detail about every confirmed case in the country, Chen had to search for publicly available governmental data and reliable news from 7 am to midnight every day.
As more cases were identified, he felt that it had far exceeded his own ability to follow it. On Jan 25 he decided to get volunteers to help.
“I shared a QR code in my WeChat moments. This allowed volunteers to enter a chat group, where we would collaborate on the map project,” recalls Chen.
To his astonishment, more than 100 users soon flowed into the group, presented their different expertise and talents and suggested the roles they could play in the team.
Two days later, the team members held an online meeting to decide a clear-cut division of labor, and to allocate tasks, such as data collection, technological support, design and modeling, as well as volunteer recruitment.
“As the team grows larger, I have to learn not only how to better communicate with my teammates, but also how to represent the group when carrying out collaborative programs with other research groups,” says Chen.
Epidemiology experts also came to offer suggestions.
Chen’s schoolmate Lu Yao has been engaged in collecting and charting details about each case, including the patient’s location, the time he or she exhibited symptoms, the hospital where the case was identified and related information sources.
Lu says when collecting data, she was exposed to overwhelming news about a large number of confirmed cases every single day, leading to a sense of depression.
“Especially after I read the details about several familial clusters of the epidemic, I had to learn to deal with my negative emotions,” she says.
However, Lu’s workload has been thankfully reduced as cases in China drop.
“I hold a more positive attitude now, and I’m glad that we can still create something valuable via collaboration, even though the ability of each of us is limited,” she says.
On March 16, the team launched a website where their global map shows known locations of coronavirus cases by country, with the smallest unit being a county or prefecture.
Locations are marked by colors representing the number of people who have tested positive. The map also shows daily changes of the outbreak on spatial and temporal scales since Jan 21.
On a chart next to the map, countries are ranked by the numbers of fatalities, confirmed cases and discharged patients.
Since most of the volunteers are college students without much experience in building a fully functional website, the project was put on ice for a while.
Fortunately, Yin Chuan, a graduate from the University of Science and Technology of China who has worked as a senior web engineer for years, took on the task of getting the project up and running again.
Before Yin contacted the team, she wanted to help also, and had been voluntarily posting tips online to prevent infection for viewers to use as reference.
“The opportunity to work for the team provides me a platform to combat the virus by using my professional advantages,” she says.
Yin used to mainly create the visual front-end elements of websites, and seldom worked on the source codes of webpages.
However, to reveal the data collected by her teammates on a wellpresented website, she quickly became familiar with her new role as a web developer.
Yin spent three weeks creating codes, designing webpages and setting up a website to track the global outbreak.
She is also in charge of the operation, maintenance and repair of the web-based system. This is the first time she has independently created a website, Yin says.