About the Project

The initial goal of this project was to provide school and district safety planners with realtime data to assist with getting students back to school. Data about both the status of COVID-19 in an area and relevant organizations in an area. We strongly believe that getting students back to their jobs of learning at school, then we can get the country back to doing their jobs. As the interface took a life of its own, we realized that other safety and emergency planners, and even the general public, might find the tool interesting.

There is a distinct challenge with the COVID-19 data though. With 50 states, over 3,000 counties, and 10's of thousands of cities all reporting data in different ways, there is no way we could keep up. So we source from a couple of organizations that are tracking the data at both county and national levels.

About New York City

Initial reporting from New York City grouped 5 Boroughs into a thing called New York City. From a common identification perspective, that is problematic. Every borough, county or parish in the country is assigned a standardized "FIPS" code (Federal Information Processing Standards).

What is New York City's
FIPS Code?

There isn't one for "New York City." But, some of other datasets really, really, really, need FIPS codes. So we "fix" New York City with every download from the New York Times and JHUM data load. We take the sum of data from NYC and assign it based on population percentage: Bronx - 17.0%, Kings - 30.7%, New York - 19.5%, Queens - 27.0%, Richmond - 5.7%. We recognize that this isn't a perfect solution, but we're going it with it until we change our minds or figure out something better.

About The “I Love U Guys” Foundation

The “I Love U Guys” Foundation’s programs for crisis response and post-crisis reunification are used in over 30,000 schools and municipalities around the world. They are created through the research-based best practices of school administrators, psychologists, public space safety experts, families, and first responders. We’re a powerful conduit uniting this work.

It was a tragedy that launched The Foundation. And we thrive because we know that with love, we can work together to protect and restore the joy of youth. We’re doing it. Join us.

On September 27th, 2006 a gunman entered Platte Canyon High School, held seven girls hostage and ultimately shot and killed Emily Keyes. During the time she was held hostage, Emily sent her parents these text messages: "I love you guys" and "I love u guys. k?"

Emily's kindness, spirit, fierce joy, and the dignity and grace shown by the Keyes family following this tragic event define the core of The "I Love U Guys" Foundation.

About the Dynamic Data

We fetch data on a daily basis from multiple sources (see below) and update our own databases. We also generate a school district/corporation data authority to provide our reporting on whether or not the district is in a county with COVID-19.

The Covid Tracking Project

An amazing effort. The Atlantic started tracking the reporting of various state and county health departments in March of 2020. The Covid Tracking Project:

The public deserves the most complete data available about COVID-19 in the US. No official source is providing it, so we are.

- Covid Tracking Project, The Atlantic

The New York Times

The New York Times provides data down to the county level. Cases and deaths. And the name of the county, state and FIPS. This is the source that is instrumental in correlating counties with schools and districts.

The New York Times is engaged in a comprehensive effort to track the details of every coronavirus case in the United States, collecting information from federal, state and local officials around the clock.

- The New York Times

Johns Hopkins University of Medicine

Another amazing effort. Johns Hopkins University of Medicine is the international view on COVID-19. They were one of, if not the first, to put up a data visualizer on the disease's spread.

COVID 19 Cleaned

Lucas Czarnecki provides a tidied version of the Johns Hopkins data. This is really convenient because the data formatting from Johns Hopkins' has been an evolving standard.

About “Powered By” Partners

As you use this tool, you may notice that the logo in the lower right rotates between a number of different partner logos. These are organizations or individuals that support the Foundation's work. Please take a moment a learn more about our Partner With Love program.

About the Static Data

We have aggregated an incredible amount of public domain data. While many organizations have this data, often it's in a variety of locations or formats.

Category	Records
Child Care Facilities	117,824
Emergency Operations County	5,895
Emergency Operations State	54
Fire Departments	26,478
Fire/EMS Stations	39,747
Higher Education	7,599
Hospitals	7,581
Hospitals Veteran	1,046
K12 Districts/Agencies	19,995
K12 Private Schools	22,890
K12 Public Schools	102,337
Laboratory	267,194
Law Enforcement	22,967
Nursing Homes	39,762
Pharmacies	72,550
Public Heath Departments	3,699
Shelter Locations	72,549
Urgent Care	4,812

Sources:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data
US Census
Department of Education

About Browsers

Life is still complicated with web browser support. This tool was developed with Mac OSX primarily viewing in Safari. Frequent checkins using Chrome and Firefox. We also tested with Chrome and Edge under Windows 10.

And Microsoft Edge made us a little crabby. CSS that worked fine with other browsers just don't render the same. Or even at all. We also clearly wrote some JavaScript that taxes the engine. So for now, if you're on a Windows computer, try to use Chrome. We'll work on fixing this for Microsoft Edge if enough folks complain.

About Mobile

As far as mobile devices, we're not there yet. But it's high on the list. Stay tuned.

About the Platforms

It starts with the hardware. We are currently running on a Linode dedicated CPU server. Our LAMP stack is Debian Linux, Apache, MariaDB, and Perl.

We use the Mapbox API to generate our maps. And our maps include school district boundaries. When we don't have latitude and longitude information, we dynamically grab it using the Here API. On "Collections" pages we leverage Newsapi.

From an interface perspective the core CSS is Bootstrap 4. JQuery and DataTables handle a bunch of UI and logic stuff. ChartJS provides the cool animated charts and Fontawesome gives us a few of the icon thingies. We currently deliver those frameworks using common CDNs.