Who started the dashboard?

Professor Lauren Gardner, a civil and systems engineering professor at Johns Hopkins University, built the dashboard with her graduate student, Ensheng Dong. It is maintained at the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at the Whiting School of Engineering, with technical support from ESRI and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Gardner is co-director of the CSSE. Learn more about Gardner and her work.

When and why was this map started?

The map was first shared publicly on Jan. 22. It was developed to provide researchers, public health authorities, and the general public with a user-friendly tool to track the outbreak as it unfolds. All data collected and displayed are made freely available through a GitHub repository, along with the feature layers of the dashboard, which are now included in the ESRI Living Atlas. For a detailed explanation for the dashboard’s development, please refer to this article in The Lancet by Professor Lauren Gardner.

Reference: Dong E, Du H, Gardner L. An interactive web-based dashboard to track COVID-19 in real time. Lancet Infect Dis; published online Feb 19. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30120-1.