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.

Read more about the COVID-19 Watcher.

Use the app online if you wish.

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