Mapping the outbreak

"I hold a more positive attitude now, and I'm glad that we can still create something valuable via collaboration, even though the ability of each of us is limited," she says.

On March 16, the team launched a website where their global map shows known locations of coronavirus cases by country, with the smallest unit being a county or prefecture.

Locations are marked by colors representing the number of people who have tested positive. The map also shows daily changes of the outbreak on spatial and temporal scales since Jan 21.

On a chart next to the map, countries are ranked by the numbers of fatalities, confirmed cases and discharged patients.

Since most of the volunteers are college students without much experience in building a fully functional website, the project was put on ice for a while.

Fortunately, Yin Chuan, a graduate from the University of Science and Technology of China who has worked as a senior web engineer for years, took on the task of getting the project up and running again.

Before Yin contacted the team, she wanted to help also, and had been voluntarily posting tips online to prevent infection for viewers to use as reference.

"The opportunity to work for the team provides me a platform to combat the virus by using my professional advantages," she says.

Yin used to mainly create the visual front-end elements of websites, and seldom worked on the source codes of webpages.

However, to reveal the data collected by her teammates on a well-presented website, she quickly became familiar with her new role as a web developer.

Yin spent three weeks creating codes, designing webpages and setting up a website to track the global outbreak.

She is also in charge of the operation, maintenance and repair of the web-based system. This is the first time she has independently created a website, Yin says.