A Coquitlam man who developed a real-time COVID-19 tracker at the start of the pandemic in March has added all 50 U.S. states to the portal at a time when cases are spiking across the American south.
The tracker also includes statistics on COVID-19 infections among military personnel, prison populations, the Navajo Nation and two cruise ships where the virus ran rampant.
Curtis Kim said he started developing the Canadian version of the online tool not long after graduating from the British Columbia Institute of Technology in the school’s computer systems technology in cloud computing program.
“Ever since this virus was out there, I thought it would be a huge, worldwide issue,” Kim told The Tri-City News when he first launched the tracker.
“I kept searching, Googling with the latest keyword. How many people were infected? Always comparing numbers. I felt like I was wasting my time.”
Kim said he programmed the web tool to automatically scrape information from government public health agencies like the BC Centre for Disease Control, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization.
But the latest data, said Kim, is more challenging to automate because of the lag in reporting. So Kim cross-references the new data and goes in manually throughout the day to update the page.
“I try to update it four times a day: morning, afternoon, evening, midnight,” he said.
The page also lists important contact numbers and feeds a selection of the latest news on the virus.
Kim, whose parents and siblings also live in Coquitlam, moved to the area about three years ago after he spent most of his young life in the South Korean provincial capital of Chuncheon. And while his home province of Gangwon-do has seen a relatively low number of positive cases of COVID-19 compared to some other areas of the country, many of his friends are directly feeling the fallout from the virus.
And while South Korea has been held as a model for fighting the spread of the coronavirus, Kim is expanding the scope of his COVID-19 tracking tool at a time when new cases of the virus have surged in his native South Korea. On Saturday, the country reported 67 new cases of the coronavirus, the largest daily jump in roughly three weeks, according to the Associated Press.
South Korea eased social distancing rules in early May and the country has been working to contain a spike in new cases since then, chiefly linked to nightclubs, churches, warehouses and door-to-door salespeople, according to the AP.
