(CNN) – If the year 2020 is good for anything, it’s the lesson that during a crisis, anyone who builds a better mousetrap will find the world beating a path to his door.
A humble team at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland reminded the world of late poet Ralph Waldo Emerson’s phrase when they created a real time tracking map of coronavirus cases and deaths.
And the world came to their door. They report that the site, plus downloads of its data, hosts three to five billion interactions daily. By their measurement, interactions include uses of the public dashboard and requests from a separate website for the underlying data used by news outlets and others who design their own maps and graphics.
Image: Civil engineering professor Lauren Gardner, of the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, is the lead behind the dashboard project.