2 News
Positivity in the Light
of a Global Pandemic
Gavin Fritz
Reporter
As the world grinded to a complete stop last month, an
outpouring of negative news surrounding the Coronavirus
occurred. eople were forced into their homes for an indefinite
amount of time and told they were no longer able to see anyone
but the people they live with, and many were faced with the
reality that they could lose loved ones to a deadly virus circling
the globe.
Despite all this tragic news, global support and resilience
emerged in an inspiring show of humanity. In various ways
people, countries, teams, states, and businesses sacrificed what
they could to help those in need. In northern Italy, a hotspot
of coronavirus infections, a cry for help led an international
response of support. Doctors from China, Russia, Cuba bringing
supplies arrived to help fight the growing crisis in taly. A also
sent a plane full of medical supplies to Italy. Support in Italy also
came from Lamborghini, who has begun using their factory to
produce masks a day for healthcare workers, sacrificing
their financial interests for the greater crisis at hand.
Back in the USA, the New England Patriots’ plane delivered 1.2
million N-95 masks from China to the state of Massachusetts.
According to CNN, dental o ces, small businesses, large
businesses, and factories are all donating goods or shifting
production to provide valuable supplies to medical facilities
across the country. Goldman Sachs, a New York investment bank
donated 100,000 masks to the state of New York. Nurses across
the country came out of retirement and returning to the front
lines to help relieve the stress on the American medical system.
These selfless acts reflect the compassionate nature of humanity
that pushes us to help those in need.
Images courtesy
of Google Images.
Coronavirus
supplies arrive in
Africa.
april 24, 2020
Proactive
Programming Shana Huang
Reporter
During these times of a global pandemic, we often feel uncertain and unsure of
the situation going on around us. hen the Covid- outbreak first occurred, so
did the rampant spread of misinformation and outdated news, causing confusion
and worry across the world. This sense of uncertainty fueled by lack of certain
resources and information prompted some Newport students to step up to the
plate.
For the past few weeks, Trevor Kwan (11) and Shrey Aeron (12) have been
developing websites to track worldwide coronavirus updates. wan’s first website,
www.covidresponse.live, is a “map-based tracker” which “displays information
about how many tests each country has conducted.” In addition, it calculates the
number of tests done per million people in each country. According to Kwan,
Covidresponse uses a technique known as “web-scraping,” where a script based in
the Python coding language runs on a server and “looks through the html source
code of other webpages to gather data.” The data is then “parsed and combined
with population data from the CIA World Factbook to calculate the amount of
tests done per million people in each country.” After matching each country in
correlation to longitude and latitude for display markers to be accurately shown on
the website’s map, the website then retrieves data from the script and projects it
onto the map which is updated every minute.
A driving factor for wan’s creation of www.covidresponse.live was the di culty
he had in finding information on Covid- tests. hen searching for information
on the pandemic, wan stated that he “had a hard time finding a source that
compared the US testing count to more than a handful of countries” and available
sources “weren’t updated regularly, didn’t represent the data in a visual manner,
and didn’t have the testing per million metric [he] was looking for.” Furthermore,
through his online search, Kwan found that none of the other coronavirus tracking
websites “aggregated testing data,” which “inspired [him] to try to create a website
that would aggregate testing counts for each country, calculate the testing per
million metric, and display it in a visual manner.”
Another website Kwan created was https://notesforfrontliners.org/, a project
dedicated towards sending notes of appreciation to healthcare workers and
others on the frontlines of the battle against Covid-19. On the homepage, the
three steps to sending a note are displayed, and users can easily click a button to
get started. The first step allows people to choose between sending their note to
either a healthcare or nursing home worker. Once a choice has been made, a list of
locations related to that profession (such as a hospital or assisted living facility) is
shown on the site. After choosing a location, users can begin writing their note.
Coincidentally, while wan was working on his first website, he found out
that Aeron was working on his own website tackling a similar issue. Aeron’s
website, https://safescore.ml/, was created to “help people see travel bans to/
from di erent countries around the world due to corona,” and was crafted with a
python program that “reads from news websites to calculate the number of bans
for di erent countries.” According to Aeron, motivation to create the website came
from his hope to make an impact with his skillset and the opportunity to “learn
new things as well.”
After discovering that both of them had made websites with similar goals in
mind, Kwan and Aeron partnered up for a joint project where they made the
website: https://safescore.ml/. When creating the website, Aeron recounted that
the duo’s overall goal was to “help people assess the situation of coronavirus in
their United States County,” and Kwan noted that the inspiration for their project
came from “the growing number of cities and states around the nation that are
setting Stay at Home Orders, and the uncertainty surrounding that.” Built from
web-scraping and the input of data from The Census Bureau, Johns Hopkins,
and the New York Times, their website, Safescore, provides people with a way to
“understand the severity of the current COVID situation and helps them make an
informed decision to benefit themselves and everyone around them” in order to
flatten the curve in the nited tates. Through a simple click of the button on the
website, users can view their current location and receive statistics on active cases,
the virus’ growth rate, and more, along with a “Safe Score” which ranges from 0 to
100, providing a summary of “the extent to which people should stay home.”
After completing their project together, Kwan and Aeron entered their website
into the COVID-19 Global Hackathon as a way to “showcase [their] work while
helping others,” and as Aeron stated, he “really enjoys doing these projects,”
which provide a way to have fun while staying at home, and help others during
these di cult times.