Developing a Real-Time Covid-19 Tracker

Join the HIMSS Canadian Prairies Chapter for an informative discussion on the development of a real-time Covid-19 Tracker Program (covid19tracker.ca) with developers Noah Little and Andrew Thong.

Extraordinary circumstances have brought out extraordinary responses from members of our community. From frontline health-care workers to researchers looking for a solution to this global health threat, there are so many stories about people are working to make our home communities safer and healthy.

Second-year USask anatomy and cell biology student Noah Little along with Design Technologist Andrew Thong of Vancouver, launched a website tracking all cases of COVID-19 in Canada.  This site has attracted considerable attention as a definitive source of Canadian Covid cases and vaccinations by media such as MacLean's in Canada and The Atlantic in the US. 

There wasn’t one case of COVID-19 in his home province of Saskatchewan when Noah Little started collecting pandemic data on March 8, 2020. With just 67 cases in all of Canada, there were no provincial or national dashboards displaying the latest numbers of cases, hospitalizations or deaths.  So Little, then a second-year undergrad studying biomedical neuroscience at the University of Saskatchewan, “put together a little something” to start keeping track. And almost overnight, his website, COVID-19 Tracker Canada, “got a bit more popular,” he recalls.  “I was trying to see the cases across Canada and there really wasn’t a spot where I could see them all at once,"

Little said his reasons for starting the site aren’t work-motivated, though he is interested in a health-care career, possibly in medicine.