(disregard) Announcement: End of microCOVID Project - 2023-03-10

[apiology]

Johns Hopkins University has announced the end of their live COVID-19 data reporting effective March 10, 2023.

microCOVID relies heavily on that data and will not function past that date in its current form.

In light of this sad news, I hope you'll join me in thanking the folks who made the microCOVID project happen, with a special focus on those that created this from nothing in a very scary time.

They gave us an evidence-based beacon through a fog of uncertainty and we are in their debt.

[apiology]

If you're interested in what we can do to salvage the value of the site, I do have some ideas, and maybe you do, too. The likely skills are frontend software engineering (TypeScript/React), data engineering (Python), and/or assessing scientific papers. Any one of the above would be useful. While I don't want to raise hopes given the effort involved, I created a thread for details on what can be done. I'll keep that thread limited to folks who in a position to help and I will moderate it strictly to keep it focused. Don't worry, though, the post you're on is open to everyone's questions and comments.

[hypodium]

Sad news indeed. :-( We've come to rely heavily on microcovid.org, particularly as testing data becomes more sparse and/or stale, we override the location-based data and enter our own estimates. Would it be possible to continue that feature?

[MichelleGlauser]

Oh, no! What will I point to now to turn down social events? Thank you so, so much to everyone who made this resource possible!

[Jar3d8]

Is there any way to keep it running without up-to-date data? Like could you take an average of the covid cases that have been in an area over the past 3 years and treat that as the value used in that part of the calculation? Or just pick a number that assumes a fixed percentage of the population in that area has covid given how virtually all strategies for the mitigation of spread have been abandoned?

I only just discovered this tool and it has been extremely helpful for me, and I know it has been extremely helpful for other people too, and I really want it to continue existing.

[boxlike-supply]

What are the costs of hosting + registration for the site? I contributed in the past and can send more again but I think there was some doubt about whether the donate link is still hooked up to someone actively involved in the project.

[apiology]

Hey all - I wanted to provide an update.

Complete and valid updates from JHU have clearly slowed down; we went almost a week without a successful prevalence run. We're up to date as of yesterday, but it's quite possible that the effective end date is closer than 3/10 as a result.

I appreciate the ideas and leads! To level-set, though, hours from skilled folks are the missing piece, not imagination on potential next steps or the comparatively cheap domain registration/tools.

Based on experience over the last few months, I do not realistically see that changing at the scale we need, but hope springs eternal. If you have a significant amount of time to spend and skills in fund raising, modeling/analysis, frontend development, or data engineering, contact me and I'd be happy to pair with you on working out a plan / learning the toolkit / whatever is needed.

[octern]

Just a note that this announcement is now out of date. We are switching the site to manual prevalence entry, which is inconvenient but hopefully will allow the site to remain useful!

[zerotrickpony]

Ya'll the site is looking really good now! Thank you so much for making these changes!!!