Meet the 17-Year-Old Behind a Website Tracking Coronavirus Cases WorldWide

17-year-old Avi Schiffmann is the teenager behind the Word’s biggest website tracking coronavirus cases that is now a vital global resource. The website provides accurate data on the number of confirmed cases, deaths, and recoveries caused by the pandemic globally.

Avi Schiffmann, a high schooler in Washington State, USA, who tutored himself how to code watching Youtube videos, said he launched nCoV2019.live in late December 2019, when the novel virus had not yet been discovered outside the epicentre, China.

The site – which has reportedly been visited over 40 million times – tracks live information sourced from the World Health Organisation, the Centers for Disease Control and from various channels to provide accurate and updated numbers on the pandemic.

The site does not only display a number of confirmed cases, deaths and recoveries but it also features an interactive map, information on the disease and the option of subscribing to a newsletter that gives you daily updates sent to your inbox.

Avi in an interview with Democracy Now! and monitored by dazeddigital.com, Avi said: “When I started this website, there were less than 1,000 total cases, they were all in the Wuhan area of China, and there was a lot of misinformation spreading. So I decided it would be cool to create a website and make it a central hub of information.”

He continued: “The purpose goal of (the website) was to provide an easy way to see the straight facts and the data, without having to make a website that was biased or full of ads. You shouldn’t have to go through government websites to download a daily PDF that’s probably out of date by the time you read it and have to go through all kinds of complicated things just to see the straight facts.”