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Jewish teen’s website that tracks coronavirus gets 3 million hits

Schiffmann’s website updates every 10 minutes and also provides a Twitter feed that offers the latest alerts and breaking news regarding the deadly virus.

By Aaron Sull, World Israel News

Thanks to a Jewish teenager in Seattle there is no need anymore to scour multiple news outlets to keep up to date with the latest coronavirus developments.

When the coronavirus first broke out last December, Avi Schiffmann, 17, developed ncov2019.live to track and monitor in real-time all reported cases of the coronavirus worldwide.

“I thought it would be cool if there was a website that could pull in all the information from all kinds of sources,” Schiffmann told NBC’s TODAY show. “I mainly wanted to create something that would show the data as accurately as possible because there has been a lot of misinformation.”

“It is really concerning how unprepared the world is,” Schiffmann continued. “In the future the world needs to be a lot more prepared for a pandemic.”

The website updates every 10 minutes and also provides information on the disease and its prevention, a Twitter feed that provides the latest alerts and breaking news regarding the deadly virus, and travel advisories.

“One of my favorite emails was this guy that was traveling in Beijing and he got quarantined there and he emailed me saying how he used my site all the time to get information,” Schiffmann told TODAY.

“There are a lot of people who use my website if they are going to travel and they want to know if they are going to be safe. It is really neat to see all that stuff,” he said.

Since Christmas, ncov2019.live has received more than 3 million unique visitors.

Schiffmann’s data is scraped from official government health organizations and trustworthy news outlets. He also coded into the website a program that cross-checks the data with the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to verify authenticity.

“I am spending most of my free time working on it,” Schiffmann told GeekWire. “I get about 100 emails a day for bug fixes, feature requests, that kind of thing, so I am always working on adding new things.”

Schiffmann is working on translating the information into more than 10 languages and provide specifics for provinces, states, and cities in real-time, reports GeekWire.

As per this report, ncov2019.live global data shows 114,186 total confirmed cases and 4,019 total deceased in the 110 countries infected.