Quick visualization of data is crucial to educating the public, planning response, and distributing resources such as personal protective equipment (PPE) and testing equipment where they are needed.

 A team from Johns Hopkins University watching the emerging outbreak of the novel coronavirus in 2019 saw the need to develop tools to help monitor the emerging pandemic as well as improve understanding of how the disease was spreading. Using real time data available through GitHub, the team created a dashboard that could be used to evaluate the disease status in different areas of the world through the creation of a map-based application.