In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, cities were struggling to find accurate data to make crucial decisions about public health. One of the first people to track data about the COVID cases was Ensheng (Frank) Dong, a PhD student at Johns Hopkins, who was tracking cases by province in his native China. He shared this early data with his professor, Dr. Lauren Gardner, a professor at Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering and the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

In this clip from an episode of GovEx’s Data Points podcast about the origins of Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Center, Dr. Gardner recalls Dong sharing his data with her and seeing a rare opportunity to leverage it to better understand the emerging COVID-19 virus.

At the time, Beth Blauer, founder of GovEx and now Johns Hopkins Associate Provost for Government Innovation, knew that the network of mayors that GovEx worked with would need accurate data about the spread of the pandemic. 

Dr. Gardner, Blauer, GovEx team members Sara Bertran de Lis and Mary Conaway DeVaughan, and many colleagues from a wide range of university departments went on to build and maintain the Coronavirus Resource Center (CRC), which became the world’s most trusted surveillance tool for reliable, real-time data about the pandemic, sustaining 1.2 billion total site views among 165 million users.

GovEx led the creation of the CRC’s searchable COVID-19 dashboard, which mapped virus cases, infection rates, deaths, vaccinations and other key trends, such as disparities in the rate of disease spread and health outcomes related to factors like race, income, and access to health insurance.

From January 2020 until it stopped collecting new data in March, 2023, the CRC provided the public, journalists, and policymakers across the United States and around the world with visualizations of cases and deaths as they were being reported.

The data’s infinite value fueled short-term and long-term decision making at personal and public levels. The CRC initiative was led almost entirely by women and drew on the expertise and collaboration of researchers and faculty from across Johns Hopkins, including the Bloomberg School of Public Health, Whiting School of Engineering, Applied Physics Laboratory, School of Medicine, and Sheridan Libraries, in addition to GovEx. 

In this podcast clip, Blauer talks about how the CRC set a new standard for cross-departmental collaboration across institutions to tackle some of the world’s most intractable problems. (Listen to the full podcast episode)

The trailblazing resource won the prestigious Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award for lighting “a path toward informed policy guidelines and personal choices amidst a morass of misinformation.” Johns Hopkins’ comprehensive pandemic data will remain free and accessible to researchers, journalists, and the public. In addition, the interdisciplinary group of faculty and experts in data science, epidemiology, medicine, public health policy, and vaccinology that advised and led the CRC will continue to provide analysis and guidance regarding the ongoing pandemic.