The Ministry of Health (MoH) today has launched a new website called COVIDNOW which turns the national COVID-19 data from the two official Github repositories into charts and visuals that are easier for the public to understand.
In general, COVIDNOW allows the public to monitor the COVID-19 situation in Malaysia in a very detailed manner without being lost in those raw numbers that are updated on a daily basis into both Github repositories. As you may recall, the COVID-19 Immunisation Task Force launched the vaccination data repository back in June, followed by MoH’s COVID-19 data repository launch a month later.
According to the About section of the site, COVIDNOW was conceived through a collaborative effort between MoH’s National Crisis Preparedness and Response Centre (CPRC), CPRC Hospital, and National Public Health Laboratory as well as a group of local developers including Henry Lim who is the creator of MYVaccineCount that offers daily vaccination statistics for Malaysia through Twitter.
The developer of MY Vax Tracker, Sheng Han Lim is onboard as well, together with Calum Lim and Roshen Maghhan. Interesting enough, all four developers choose to help develop COVIDNOW voluntarily without any payment from the government.
We did #COVIDNOW voluntarily. We didn't want to be paid for this, & we're delighted that MoH recognised us on the official site.
We hope people focus on an amazing development with tons of data made open by MoH. That's the win. ♥️
– Lim³ + Roshen https://t.co/27jxE9FKvA
— Henry Lim (@henrylim96) September 9, 2021
Just like the data sources themselves, there is plenty of information that one can obtain through COVIDNOW. Aside from attaining active rate cases, vaccination rate, and death cases, the public is also able to look into ICU utilisation rates, ventilators, hospital beds, and quarantine centres.
Users can even narrow down COVIDNOW’s data set to each state. For those who are interested in Klang Valley, they can also choose to see the combined data of Selangor, Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya.
For more information, just visit COVIDNOW right here to see the site in action.
