Certainly the story of Guillaume Rozier is beautiful.
This 25-year-old computer engineer, originally from Clamart, built the CovidTracker site on his own.
The latter quickly became the French benchmark for pandemic monitoring.
But Australia has just given us an even
crazier
“
success story
”.
While since its inception, no one has known the identity of the brain behind the CovidBaseAU site, one of Australia's main epidemic monitoring sites, the information was disclosed on Thursday 23 September.
And surprise, it's three young teenagers: Wesley (14), Jack and Darcy (both 15).
Read also Guillaume Rozier: from CovidTracker to ViteMaDose
It was the protagonists themselves who revealed the information, in a tweet posted by the official CovidBaseAU account.
They took advantage of the opening of vaccination to 12-15 year olds to receive their first dose of Moderna vaccine in pharmacies and have their picture taken, a bandage on the upper left arm.
The snapshot is accompanied by the message: “
Today, the three of us who manage CovidBaseAU, Jack, Wesley and Darcy, received our first dose of the Moderna vaccine.
We thought it would be a good time to announce who we really are.
"
A project "
for fun
"
The CovidBaseAU site has been monitoring the main indicators on the health situation in Australia, since April 2021, such as the number of cases or people vaccinated.
The teenagers from Melbourne told ABC TV that the project was originally due to see the light of day in February.
A plan undertaken "
just for fun,
" they explained, a way to harness their taste for computer coding and the media.
The purpose of the site was to aggregate data on Covid published by the eight states and territories of the island continent as well as by the federal government.
“
We wanted to put them together and display them on a website so that they were accessible to everyone,
” Darcy explained.
Read alsoHow was born the well-followed CovidTracker site
After this statement, which received more than 16,000 "
likes
" on Twitter in 24 hours, the three boys were offered a part-time job at the Burnet Institute of Health by the country's public health directorate. .
