US Professor Lauren Gardner won the highest science award for creating the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard. This is a project to track and map viral outbreaks around the world in the early days of the pandemic.

Gardner, an associate professor of civil and systems engineering at Johns Hopkins University, said on Wednesday that he will be the winner of the 2022 Lasker Foundation for creating the tracker, which was described as a “pioneering resource” by the US-based Lasker Foundation. Nominated as a recipient of the Bloomberg Public Service Award. “Lighting the way to informed policy guidelines and personal choices in a morass of misinformation” as the world grapples with a new disease.

Gardner, who studies disease transmission modeling, was meeting with graduate student Ensheng Dong on Jan. 21, 2020, just weeks after the first coronavirus case was detected in Wuhan, China. The two had intended to discuss vaccine hesitation and measles, but Dong said he was also tracking new cases of COVID-19 infection in China.

The next day, the duo began an early prototype mapping the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases. At that time, there were 322 infections spread throughout East Asia.

Gardner announced the new tool in a tweet on January 22, 2020, writing: You can check the case and location here. Data can be downloaded. ”

We are tracking the spread of 2019-nCoV in real time. You can check the case and location here. downloadable data. #ncov-2019 @JHU Systems https://t.co/qfVymyUf7v pic.twitter.com/SS9zUwrQxT

— Lauren Gardner (@TexasDownUnder) January 22, 2020

The Lasker Foundation expanded the tracker to include soaring death tolls, recoveries and subsequent vaccinations, and as Gardner’s team created a system to compile figures from different reporting methods from countries around the world, the “public It revolutionized health reporting.” Tracker has grown to collect and verify information from over 3,500 different sources.

As of Wednesday, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, a website that houses Global Tracker and other COVID trend data, has received nearly 1.2 billion page views since 2020, according to the university. was

To date, trackers have documented over 616 million COVID cases, at least 6.5 million deaths, and nearly 9 billion vaccine doses worldwide.

Johns Hopkins University said the data and analysis by her team of experts will help inform policy makers, the medical community, the news media and the public to track the pandemic and combat its spread. I was.

The university hopes that Gardner’s team will use this information further to identify actions in the hardest-hit areas across the United States in the early trajectory of the outbreak, which was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020. He added that he investigated how the

Earlier this month, the head of the UN agency, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announced that the end of the pandemic was finally in sight.

I don’t think there is an engineer who has more influence than this. @Johns Hopkins Professor Lauren Gardner for the first time in a while.

Professor Gardner has brought back the 2022 Lasker Bloomberg Awards.@TexasDownUnder https://t.co/VLngyKVLIh

— Denis Wirtz (@deniswirtz) September 28, 2022

Early in the outbreak, information compiled by Gardner’s team also revealed “a lack of US-wide data-reporting standards that resulted in fragmented reporting by individual states,” the university said.

Gardner said, “It plays a vital role in keeping the world informed during a global public health crisis and, just as importantly, changing expectations about public access to data and information. was an extraordinary experience.”

In a statement released by the university, Gardner added that he hopes to apply the lessons learned from the project to other crises, including climate change.

“These are people-centred problems with deep-seated inequalities and are often highly politicized. At the heart of many of these problems is arguably the most grave threat facing society today. One of them is the harm caused by misinformation,” she said.

“Addressing these problems requires data-driven solutions and effective science communication. It requires investment and innovation in interdisciplinary science and strong partnerships between researchers and practitioners.” ‘ she said.