Company
Date Published
Author
Marena Brinkhurst
Word count
868
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

The COVID Schools Canada project, initiated by the grassroots group Masks4Canada, aims to provide transparency on the impact of COVID-19 on schools across Canada by compiling and visualizing case and outbreak data. Due to a lack of data transparency from provincial governments, the group launched a data tracker that initially used Google My Maps but faced scaling challenges, prompting a switch to Mapbox with support from the Mapbox Community team. This transition allowed the team to create a dynamic, user-friendly map that updates in real-time with data sourced from crowd-sourced submissions and school board records, processed through a pipeline involving Google Sheets, Perl, Python, and R. The project has documented over 55,600 COVID-19 cases in Canadian schools, gaining significant attention and a large following on social media, and it highlights the importance of community-driven initiatives in public health transparency.