A teenager’s guide to building the world’s best pandemic and protest trackers
Check out this recent piece from the MIT Technology Review highlighting the impressive tracking work from teenager Avi Schiffmann.
The coronavirus pandemic and the protests sparked by the May 25 murder of George Floyd have been the defining events of 2020 so far, and in both cases one 17-year-old has played a major role online: Avi Schiffmann, the creator of the web’s preeminent covid-19 case tracker and, more recently, a protest tracking site.
The trackers have garnered praise for providing concise, instantly updated information. Schiffmann’s coronavirus tracker is so thorough, in fact, that epidemiologists have used it to predict the disease’s spread. Schiffmann has earned the Webby Person of the Year award along with praise from Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who called the teen’s site “essential.”
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