The Coronavirus Tracking Project by The New York Times was one of the biggest and most ambitious coordinated reporting efforts to date. For 3 years the Times collected data daily in every county in the US aimed to help readers understand the changing nature of Covid infections and deaths across the country.

As part of the efforts to help readers stay up-to-date with the latest Covid cases, deaths, and vaccination rates across the U.S., the Times created the Personalized Covid Tracker. This interactive website prompts readers to select places they want to track and summarizes the latest data for those places. Readers are also able to to opt-in to a daily email alert that brings those data and visualizations directly to readers through their inboxes.

At the time of this writing (Oct 25, 2023), the total number of people who used the personalized coronavirus tracker was nearly 1M. The number of readers receiving personalized email alerts was >460K.

Contributions

I worked closely with the Graphics team over a period of 3+ years. As part of the onsite interactive, I helped develop and maintain the component that allows readers to select and store places they care about. As part of the personalized Covid tracker email alert, I helped build the project end-to-end, from the data processing scripts needed to create personalized summaries of Covid data for readers’ selected places to the system for rendering and delivering the custom data visualizations and content to readers’ inboxes.

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→ See the project on The New York Times | Track Coronavirus Cases in Places Important to You
→ Sign up for the email at The New York Times | Coronavirus Tracker Email Alert

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