When Duke students learned that classes were moving online, many were on spring break trips with friends or lounging in their childhood homes. But senior Peter Sun was spending nine-hour days working on the largest volunteer-run COVID-19 case tracker in the United States.
The tracker was started by five software engineers through 1Point3Acres, an online community for Chinese international students and professionals in North America. According to Sun, the tracker is run by a team of volunteers that includes between 50 and 75 people and distributes real-time state and international data about COVID-19 cases, deaths and recoveries.
The 1Point3Acres tracker uses data provided by county-level public health authorities, which means that their dashboard is usually updated more quickly than state government data, according to Sun. Data from the tracker has been used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Global Cases Tracker, the United Nations and numerous other emergency relief organizations and research institutions, according to the tracker’s website.
When Sun, an international student who was born in China and grew up in Australia, canceled his spring break trip to Peru, he decided he wanted to do something to contribute to efforts to stop the spread of COVID-19.
“If I was staying at Duke, I wanted to do something about this, rather than just watch Netflix in my dorm all day,” Sun said.
Sun said he started donating to coronavirus relief funds but did not feel completely satisfied.
“You sign a check and it goes somewhere. It doesn’t feel that tangible,” he said. When Sun discovered the 1Point3Acres database, he sent an email to the leaders of the project offering his full-time services for the week of spring break.
Lin Zuo, Trinity ‘19, got involved in the tracker because she had to cancel post-graduation travel plans because of the pandemic and wanted to put her time to good use.
“In late February, I was looking for volunteering opportunities to help raise awareness of COVID-19 in North America. That’s when [1Point3Acres’] tracker came to my attention. I wanted to help expand the tracker and bring data transparency to the public,” Zuo wrote in an email.
Both Sun and Zuo started out working full-time on the data team, collecting and cross-checking real-time case confirmation, death and recovery updates and manually entering those numbers into the tracker. However, as the 1Point3Acres team worked to automate and optimize data collection, both were released from their full-time duties. Zuo, who recently started a full-time job, now works on weekends, and Sun works two or three hours per day.
Now, Zuo’s responsibilities revolve around maximizing the tracker’s efficiency. This has included starting a document with advice for how to log data for each state, creating tutorials for new volunteers, working with developers to simplify the process of logging data and streamlining the quality-control process, she wrote.
“Now, with more automation tools deployed, our job has transitioned to focusing on quality control of data and improving automation tools with the developer team,” she wrote.
Sun’s current roles in the project include running the Twitter account and helping to input international data.
Sun, who is majoring in economics with a minor in art history, said that one of his first challenges was developing proficiency in the technological skills necessary to contribute to the tracker. Although he did have some coding experience, Sun said that “the learning curve was definitely pretty steep” as he reviewed GitHub and Python. He was encouraged by a sense of urgency unlike anything he’d ever felt at school.
“COVID-19 wasn’t going to wait for me to learn GitHub,” Sun said. “It’s definitely an even stronger urgency that registers in me than when going for grades.”
Sun said that he also had to learn how to run social media. He doesn’t have a personal Twitter account, but he has grown the 1Point3Acres tracker’s account from 200 to more than 11,000 followers.
Both Sun and Zuo expressed that working on the tracker was emotionally challenging, especially at first.
“I still remember my first time logging in death details for older adults who passed away in the nursing homes of Washington State because of COVID-19, I burst into tears and felt deeply sad for them, their family and friends and everyone whose life has been impacted by the pandemic,” Zuo wrote.
“People on the team never really forgot that each of the numbers we have is an individual. And that was especially strong in the beginning,” Sun said.
Sun explained that as the U.S. caseload increased, county governments no longer had the capability to release detailed patient information, so the tracker’s team had to stop updating the status of each person in their database.
“It was hard to see that go because I feel like being able to look at each of the people who passed away was a sign of humanity for the people on the team. Does it make sense for data science to be efficient? Probably not. But does it make sense for us as human beings to pay respect in this way? Yes. It was very hard for us to let go of being able to update every person who passed away,” Sun said.
Despite the hard work and emotional challenges, Sun and Zuo expressed that their experiences volunteering for the tracker have been very rewarding.
“Despite the emotional challenges, there were many moments of joy. From receiving appreciation messages from users to gaining more attention on media, from receiving more than a million website visits to sharing data with organizations like CDC and JHU, we have come a long way to become one of the largest independent data sources across North America and I feel very proud of the impact we made,” Zuo wrote.
Both Zuo and Sun said that they plan to remain working for the tracker as long as their services are needed.
“The best scenario I can hope for is that I get fired from the tracker job... because the situation is getting normalized. I have never hoped to get put out of a job so desperately,” Sun said.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.
Anna Zolotor is a Trinity senior and recruitment chair for The Chronicle's 118th volume. She was previously news editor for Volume 117.