In 2020 the CDC needed to put COVID-19 data in front of the public fast, and keep it current while the numbers changed every day. I led front-end development on the maps and charts for the COVID-19 Data Tracker on CDC.gov.
The tracker home page in December 2021, via the Wayback Machine.
What I did
- Built the tracker’s public maps and charts, turning large public health data sets into views people could read at a glance.
- Built related tools for private government tracking on the same data.
Why it mattered
For a long stretch, this was where a lot of people went to understand what was happening. The tracker’s home page alone logged over 71 million views across 2020 and 2021, enough to make CDC.gov’s ten most visited pages both years, and that’s before counting the maps and charts on every other tab. It had to be accurate, accessible and fast, on deadlines nobody got to choose.