On Jan. 23, long before most Americans were even aware that a new virus was spreading from China, Johns Hopkins University
announced the launch of a coronavirus dashboard that had been created by
Lauren Gardner, a young civil engineer.
“This is something I think we should watch,” Jones told superiors at the state health department on Jan. 24. At the time, she was head of the department’s geographic information system division, which mapped how
hurricanes like Michael battered the state.
Jones, who had been a journalism student at Syracuse University in New York and then studied climate science at Louisiana State and, later, Florida State, had joined the state health department in 2018 while still pursuing her doctorate in geography. As the coronavirus spread from China to Europe and the Middle East, Jones pestered her superiors to be allowed to create a Johns Hopkins-like portal for the state. She says they told her it wasn’t necessary, as it would only frighten people.
Finally, on March 12, she got a call from Carina Blackmore, the head of
the health department’s infectious disease division.
“They wanted a dashboard, and they wanted it up today,” Jones says Blackmore told her. The task would have been impossible, except Jones had prepared mock-ups of the dashboard. “I had it up in two hours.” (Blackmore declined to speak to Yahoo News for this article, as did all other health department officials contacted.)
Software engineer Olivier Lacan, who lives in Orlando and volunteers for the COVID Tracking Project, remembers when he first encountered Jones’s creation, only to be astonished by the ease with which it allowed him to access information about the coronavirus. “It really felt like plugging into ‘The Matrix’ in some ways,” Lacan says. He remembers thinking, “I can’t believe I have access to this.”
Lacan says Florida stood out, for once not as
the butt of jokes but as an example of getting it right. “Everyone had data. It was just a question of how much of a mess it was,” he told Yahoo News. “California was a tragedy for months.”
Others noticed too, including Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force. “That’s the kind of knowledge and power we need to put into the hands of American people,” she
said of the Florida dashboard on “Face the Nation” on April 19, “so that they can see where the virus is, where the cases are, and make decisions.”