'A new standard': The woman behind the Johns Hopkins COVID dashboard wins major prize
On Wednesday, Gardner won the 2022 Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award. Past honorees include Doctors Without Borders and Dr. Anthony Fauci.
In January 2020, Gardner was talking with her graduate student Ensheng Dong, who had been worriedly checking for updates on family in China’s Shanxi province. Gardner suggested he create a map to track the virus globally. Dong built a website in a day, and after a few tweaks it was live. “We knew it was important. I knew that the data had a lot of value, because I always did work where we needed that kind of data and didn’t have it,” Gardner said. “But I guess I didn’t expect to be the sole source of it.”
As COVID-19 cases multiplied around the world, so did the behind-the-scenes work to keep the dashboard going. More and more countries were reporting deaths and cases, which meant more data to gather, verify and standardize. Manual updates were no longer feasible, so the team built automated scrapers to gather data from official health databases around the world that were available to the public.
The team had a rule to include only publicly available data so that anyone who wanted to could verify the dashboard’s sources. When state or regional agencies contacted the group privately to offer case counts they didn’t want to report officially, the Johns Hopkins engineers declined.
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