Director Wes Craven, writer Gertrude Stein, President of the United States Woodrow Wilson and billionaire Michael Bloomberg have one thing in common: they all counted at one point in their lives among students at Johns Hopkins University. The name of this establishment continues to appear in the countless articles devoted to Covid-19, a phenomenon explained in part by its interactive map allowing to follow with forecast the evolution of the pandemic for several months in the world.
Since it went online on January 22, the popularity of this dashboard has grown steadily. Every day, it is seen tens of millions of times by Internet users. Among them, Pablo Canales, a thesis at the Institut Pasteur and passed through Johns-Hopkins University a few years ago. “I consult it every day. To my knowledge, this is truly one of the best sources available today, ”said the Mexican student. The tool is also highly valued by the United States government. In late February, it was prominently displayed on a wall in the Department of Health and Social Services during a visit by Vice President Mike Pence.
That this card was created at Johns-Hopkins is not a surprise in itself. Founded 144 years ago in Baltimore, Maryland, the private university and hospital of the same name were created thanks to a donation of seven million dollars made after the death of Johns Hopkins, who has become immensely wealthy by investing in the railroad.
Recognized excellence
Ranked 10 th best university in the United States according to the latest list established by the US News & World Report, it is particularly renowned for its medical school, which ranks second on the national podium for research, just behind that of Harvard . No less than 18 Nobel Prize winners in medicine studied or taught at Johns-Hopkins.
This excellence is paid for very dearly: it costs more than $ 53,000 a year to study there. "The main campus, with its large parks, is located on the edge of Baltimore, but the medical school and the hospital are in the heart of the city," says Pablo Canales.
However, it was not at medical school that the famous interactive map was developed. It is the fruit of the work of Lauren Gardner, associate professor of civil engineering who had previously worked in the modeling of epidemics of measles and the zika virus, and of one of her Chinese students, Ensheng Dong. "We started working on it in January, when the epidemic was still limited to China," said Gardner in a recent interview with the journal Science. We developed the first dashboard in a few hours. I shared it the next day on Twitter and it immediately became very popular. "
The Taiwan controversy
Lauren Gardner's team now has a dozen people to feed the dashboard. The number of cases has exploded over the weeks, but the amount of work, if it remains very important, has not followed the same growth. “In the beginning, we did everything manually. Now almost everything is automated and updated every hour, ”says Lauren Gardner. The team has been rotated to keep an eye on the servers and data curation.
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Where does this data come from? World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in the United States and Europe, Chinese National Health Commission, doctors and health professionals gathered on the DXY site ... The sources are varied. The work on sources is the most complex for the United States, for which Johns Hopkins' tool precisely identifies the number of cases at the county or even city scale. As the CDC only provides data for the states, sometimes 24 to 48 hours late, Gardner's team also uses articles from the local press.
The success of the dashboard concocted in Baltimore is not without causing its share of controversies. A controversy illustrates the importance that the work carried out in Maryland has acquired. For a time, Taiwan was renamed on the map "Taipei and its surroundings", a designation more suited to the positions of Beijing, which considers the island as an integral part of China. After protests from the Taiwanese government and criticism from elected officials like Senator Marco Rubio, Taiwan has finally returned to its original name. "The team now uses the names used by the US State Department, including for Taiwan," Johns-Hopkins University told Axios.