This wasn’t a coincidence—it was the fruit of collaboration.

Sharing open-source code for covid dashboards

At the time of shuttering, the covid19india.org developers noted there were more reliable sources for covid data than when they started, including the Ministry of Health, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), and international organizations like Johns Hopkins University.

However, government data remain clunky and incongruent. The ministry of health’s information is scattered in different pdfs and jpegs, rendering them difficult to download and streamline. While districts and states share granular data, there’s no uniformity in how they present it.

Covid19india.org had already ironed out a bunch of kinks, from verifying data from different sources to fixing discrepancies. They had also automated much of their manual labour.

Before shutting down, they left a detailed post on how to use their application programming interface (API).”We advise analysts and other dashboards that feed off our APIs to start planning their transition to an alternate data source,” the team said. And people did.

A banner atop one of the new sites, covid19bharat.org, says it’s “an effort to follow in the footsteps” of the original tracker. Another, covid19tracker.in, thanks covid19india.org’s team “for their outstanding work in creating the original portal, and for making their code base public.”

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