Johns Hopkins’ Covid-19 map: Meet the team behind the leading resource

From December 2019 to January 2020, Ensheng Dong, Gardner’s first-year PhD student, heard from family in China who regularly reported how the outbreak was worsening and upending their lives. After passing an exam that cleared him to earn his PhD, tracking confirmed cases in China was what he wanted to tackle next.

On January 21, over coffee during a weekly research meeting, Dong proposed this idea to Gardner.

“He’s gotten to play some pretty major roles in some really central problems to the society for someone that’s six months into a degree program,” Gardner said. “I keep telling him that he needs to not get used to this and it’s not normal. And [that] the rest of his PhD experience is going to be really boring, but I don’t think he believes me.”

For two weeks from dawn till dusk, Dong lived and breathed the dashboard; it took precedence over his free time outside of class and soon the classes themselves. With Gardner’s blessing, he pushed back a required course until the fall semester.

Has maintaining those responsibilities affected his health in any way? “Not really,” he said. “I think this is what the research should do. The responsibility for this dashboard gives me energy.”

But as cases became globally widespread, they needed help.

“Initially, [I worried about my family]; right now, it’s their time to worry about my situation in the US,” Dong said.

What was once a modest goal to fill a research gap in a field with antiquated methods for disease tracking is now a tool widely used around the world.

They had no idea “that it would evolve into something that literally impacts almost everybody’s life on the planet,” Gardner said.

From erratic data to the map on our screens

About 25 people from multiple disciplines now support the dashboard, including graduate students and senior software developers and research scientists primarily based in Maryland, California and England.

Like a lot of people, they’re working from home. Their days begin with Zoom calls during which they hash out to-do lists and pressing issues. The conversation continues through a myriad of Slack channels, emails and phone calls.

“It’s efficient, but it’s boring,” Gardner said. “I really miss a bit of the real, in-person world.”

Gardner is in charge, so everyone involved reports to her. Her daily to-do list involves running a research group of PhD students, overseeing data additions and design for the dashboard and making strategic decisions for the development of the dashboard. She spends about half of her time on research based on data from the map.

Because they update the dashboard at least hourly, they’ve had to shift from manual data collection to leaning more on automatic culling — the team praised data wizards at the university’s Applied Physics Laboratory for creating a code that periodically travels to trusted websites and scrapes for data. For independent research and the US government, the APL provides technological systems engineering, development and analysis.

“Not to be cliche, but a picture is worth a thousand words,” Lau said. The APL team works on building and maintaining the automated capabilities of the data-pulling code.

Frequent updates and data from multiple sources is what makes the dashboard different from the World Health Organization’s tracker, which counts only states and nations, said Beth Blauer, executive director of the Center for Government Excellence at the university’s 21st Century Cities Initiative, a campus hub for research, teaching and outreach that ensures governments think of data as a critical asset for problem-solving.

Blauer’s work with the Center for Government Excellence is her day job, but she also began working with the data in March after she used the map to assess the risk of traveling.

She’s also a single mom. “[My kids] deserve some kind of an award for the way that they’ve been able to stick with me through this,” Blauer said.

The map places at people’s fingertips “information upon which they can make really important decisions,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, who works on projects similar to Blauer’s, but for the Coronavirus Resource Center. Nuzzo is an associate professor in the university’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

“For governments, it’s about very high consequence decisions about protecting health and supporting the economy. And for people, it’s about how to protect yourself and your loved ones.”

The challenges of informing the world

Work that relays ever-changing information from thousands of places comes with hurdles. There’s no international modus operandi for how to count coronavirus infections and deaths.

The dashboard’s infrastructure is more stable these days, but the “sources and information coming in are still changing quite a bit,” Gardner said.

And sometimes the numbers between state and county health departments don’t match up — they report differently or at varying times.

Each time these transitions happen, the team has to figure out how to handle them.

The biggest challenge is trying to collect data “from multiple locations simultaneously and provide it in real time while all of those dynamics are at play,” Gardner said. Knowing there are so many eyes on it and having to explain it is difficult, too, she added.

Lessons on human behavior and how a virus travels

A county’s health care capacity and access, demographics and disease data in comparison to its state are three factors starting to reveal those disparities.

Data on testing and contact tracing could illuminate long-term patterns regarding race, socioeconomic status and systemic barriers to testing access — an effort headed by Blauer and Nuzzo.

“There is nothing so stark than looking at the disproportionate amount of Black and Latino people that are [contracting and] dying from this disease, knowing there is no medical safety net for them and also understanding that there are deliberate decisions that aren’t taking their best interests in mind,” Blauer said.

“This is the piece that I think has been the most difficult for me.”

How they’re coping during the pandemic

For a long time, Gardner felt removed from reality since busyness left no time for reflection on what was happening around her. Since the dashboard processes have stabilized, she’s been able to focus more on the circumstances.

“I would say that I’m probably one of the more frustrated people with the situation, because I am just so well aware of the patterns, the trends, the direction we’re going and mistakes we’re making,” she said. “Watching that happen … it’s extra frustrating.”

Seeing the contextual reality of the data and thus being able to understand relative risks helps Nuzzo cope with what might otherwise be constant worry. But she also “can’t shut off the pandemic.”

“It’s both my job and my life in a way that usually at the end of your workday, you get a break from what you’re working on,” she said. “We don’t escape it at all. That can be just emotionally exhausting.”

What the future holds

The need for this kind of data and analysis isn’t going away any time soon, Nuzzo presumed.

Considering how the dashboard will be used during and after the pandemic has been fruitful.

“I believe there’s a vision of the world in which if outbreaks of a new virus happen, we can also have the public health capabilities to stop the virus in its place, to prevent it from becoming a global pandemic,” Nuzzo said. “But as we’re seeing now, we have more work to do in order to make that happen.”