COVID tracking dashboard

While working as a Newsroom Developer for Spotlight PA in 2020, I collaborated with developers at the Philadelphia Inquirer to build a live, interactive dashboard of Pennsylvania coronavirus statistics. The dashboard was ultimately retired by Spotlight PA and the Inquirer in 2022 as the nature of the pandemic changed.

During development, one of the key challenges of this project was ensuring a consistent and reliable stram of COVID-19 data. As the pandemic progressed, our team needed to constantly rebuild and tweak custom webscrapers that sourced data from a variety of state and federal websites.

Similarly, the dashboard itself, built with React and published on the websites of Spotlight PA and the Philadelphia Inquirer, involved a near-weekly process of iteration and redesign to ensure we were providing readers with the best UX experience possible. The dashboard featured a bevy of interactives maps, charts and tables on COVID-19 trends – including reported cases, deaths, and hospitalization rates – and allowed users to easily compare Pennsylvania statistics to other states.

The dashboard consistently ranked as one the most visited pages on the website of Spotlight PA for the duration of its operation and was a major driver of traffic to the website at large.