Online map lets public track spread of coronavirus. What’s with that California dot?
Computer engineers at Johns Hopkins University created a nifty online dashboard that allows the public to track the spread of new coronavirus worldwide, but the tool caused some consternation Monday among media and public health officials in California.
That’s because the dashboard map pinpointed a case of coronavirus in the Fresno area rather than in two Southern California counties, as public health officials had announced over the weekend.
A public health spokesperson in Fresno County said there are no local cases of coronavirus. Officials there saw the mapping tool, but had no idea why a dot had been placed in the county. State public health officials suggested Fresno direct inquiries to Los Angeles and Orange counties, where the cases of new coronavirus had been announced.
In an email to The Bee on Tuesday morning, a Johns Hopkins spokesman said the map tracks case data by state, not city.
Clovis Fire Department Chief John Bilaski said he actually got an email Monday from someone who said: “Look, there’s two cases over by Avocado Lake,” a popular 210-acre park near Fresno. Bilaski called The Bee Tuesday morning after his daughter alerted him to this article.
He said the email he received prompted him to contact experts in geographic information system mapping, and they told him that it looked like the California dot had been placed in the geographic center of the state. The same seems true in Arizona, Bilaski said, where case of coronavirus was reported in Maricopa County. The dot, though, appears far from that location.
The fact that the Seattle and Chicago dots appear in the right location is a function of this software quirk, Bilaski said. If you click on the dots in each state, he said, you get a text box with more details. If you look at China, he added, the reporting is done by province and the dots get bigger as more reports populate the database.
The online dashboard, created by Johns Hopkins’ Center for Systems Science and Engineering, displays the number of deaths and infections reported in countries and cities around the world. As of 1 p.m. Tuesday, the dashboard showed 4,690 confirmed cases and 106 deaths worldwide. In the United States, there have been five reported cases since Jan. 21, all travelers who arrived from Wuhan, China.
Civil engineering professor Lauren Gardner, the engineering center’s co-director, said: “We built this dashboard because we think it is important for the public to have an understanding of the outbreak situation as it unfolds with transparent data sources. For the research community, this data will become more valuable as we continue to collect it over time.”
The Johns Hopkins researchers said the data in the map are coming from the World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China, and Dingxiangyuan, a social networking site for health care professionals that provides real-time information.
Officials with the California Department of Public Health say the immediate health risk from the new coronavirus, formally known as nCoV 2019, is low for state residents. The two people in the state who had the disease reported symptoms to public health officials and were transported to hospital isolation units for treatment.
This story was originally published January 27, 2020 at 4:07 PM with the headline "Online map lets public track spread of coronavirus. What’s with that California dot?."
