Not Vaporware

Avi Schiffmann Photo Credit: screen grab, democracynow.org

Question: What can a seventeen-year-old high school kid do that the President of the United States can't?

Answer: Build a fact-based, not-vaporware website.

Here's the story about Avi Schiffmann and his website: https://ncov2019.live/data.

Meet the 17-Year-Old Behind a Website Tracking Coronavirus Cases That Is Now a Vital Global Resource, Amy Goodman, democracynow.org, 13 Mar 2020.

17-year-old high school junior in Seattle, Washington, who developed the coronavirus tracker.
A teenager’s website tracking coronavirus has become one of the most vital resources for people seeking accurate and updated numbers on the pandemic. The URL is nCoV2019.live. We speak with 17-year-old Avi Schiffmann, a high school junior from Mercer Island outside Seattle, who started the site in late December, when coronavirus had not yet been detected outside of China. Now the site has been visited by tens of millions from every country on Earth. It tracks deaths, numbers of cases locally and globally, and provides an interactive map, information on the disease, and a Twitter feed. The resource updates every minute or so, and pulls information from the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and elsewhere.



Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we go now to Seattle, Washington, where one teenager’s website tracking the coronavirus has become one of the most vital resources for people seeking accurate and updated numbers on the pandemic. The URL is nCoV2019.live. That’s nCoV2019.live. Seventeen-year-old Avi Schiffmann started the site in late December when the coronavirus had not yet been detected outside China. Now the site’s been visited by tens of millions of people from all over the planet. The site tracks deaths, numbers of cases locally and globally, and it talks about the number of people who have recovered. It also provides an interactive map, information on the disease, and a Twitter feed. The resource, which updates every minute or so, pulls information from the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and elsewhere.

Well, 17-year-old Avi Schiffmann joins us now from Seattle, Washington.

Welcome to Democracy Now! First off, Avi, is your school still in session?

AVI SCHIFFMANN: No, my school closed today for about a month and a half or two. It’s kind of crazy.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, it only leaves you more time, I guess, to continue this unbelievable global resource.

AVI SCHIFFMANN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about your website. And what? You started it in December?

AVI SCHIFFMANN: Yeah, I started this website around Christmas of last year. And I mean, the main goal of it was to provide just an easy way to see the straight facts and the data, you know, without having to make a website that was biased or, you know, full of ads or anything like that. So, I mean, you can, like, go on a phone and just instantly see like the quick facts. You can see the total amount of cases, the total deaths and, you know, all that kind of information. And you can get that for individual countries, and now U.S. states, too, and all kinds of things. So, I didn’t want to make it hard. You know, you shouldn’t have to go through government websites and download like a daily PDF that’s probably out of date by the time you read it, and, you know, have to go through all kinds of complicated things, just to see, you know, the straight facts. So, that was the main reason why I wanted to make this website.

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