Fox 19: UC students create COVID-19 Watcher
Biomedical Informatics students in the College of Medicine track COVID-19 cases
University of Cincinnati students Benjamin Wissel, part of the MD/PhD program, and Pieter-Jan Van Camp, MD, a doctoral student in biomedical informatics, have developed the COVID-19 Watcher. The two UC students, with support from UC faculty and Cincinnati Children’s staff, created an Interactive Dashboard during the spring when there were few options for tracking COVID-19 cases in cities like Cincinnati.
The COVID-19 Watcher displays data from every county and 188 metropolitan areas in the country. Features of the dashboard include ranking of the worst affected areas and auto-generating plots that depict temporal changes in testing capacity, cases and deaths. The COVID-19 Watcher can provide the public with real-time updates of outbreaks in their area. The app pulls in data from the New York Times, which has been tracking COVID-19 cases since January, and merges it with sources from the U.S. Census to map cases for each county and metropolitan area.
Listen to Wissel’s interview with Fox 19.
Related Stories
Love it or raze it?
February 20, 2026
An architectural magazine covered the demolition of UC's Crosley Tower.
Social media linked to student loneliness
February 20, 2026
Inside Higher Education highlighted a new study by the University of Cincinnati that found that college students across the country who spent more time on social media reported feeling more loneliness.
Before the medals: The science behind training for freezing mountain air
February 19, 2026
From freezing temperatures to thin mountain air, University of Cincinnati exercise physiologist Christopher Kotarsky, PhD, explained how cold and altitude impact Olympic performance in a recent WLWT-TV/Ch. 5 news report.