One of the most popular ways to track the spread of Covid-19 is on a website designed by a high school student. Avi Schiffmann, a 17-year-old from Mercer Island, Washington, created nCoV2019.live to provide current data on the pandemic.
Avi’s site uses a technology called web scraping to gather information from online health department databases around the world. Avi has also designed an algorithm, or set of instructions for his computer to follow, to organize the huge amount of data collected from hundreds of websites.
The last step is to feed the information to his website so millions of people all over the globe can easily access it. The site offers quick facts, statistics, and a map showing how the pandemic spreads. “So many people rely on this website,” says Avi. “They check it every single day.