"Covid Alerts" emailer app

In 2020, while working as a Newsroom Developer for Spotlight PA, I designed and built a Python app that generates and sends weekly emails of COVID-19 statistics to readers based on their county of residence in Pennsylvania.

At its peak, the app sent emails to more than 3,000 subscribers. The project won the "Reader Initiative Award" in the 2021 Professional Keystone Press Awards.

The app was ultimately retired in 2021 as the nature of the pandemic changed.

For development, we opted to use SendGrid to handle the bulk mailing of emails owing to the simplicity of the service's API and its relatively cheap price at the time the app operated. We used Pandas and GeoPandas to wrangle and process publicly available COVID-19 data. Altair was used to generate static maps and charts to visualize that data. You can view a sample email here.