Andrew Jackson, a Creative Technologist at FCB, has created an interactive map that syncs with the Ministry of Health for automatic updates and the ability to see cluster outbreaks as they are recorded.

Andrew explains, “The Ministry of Health was reporting statistics, but they weren’t very intuitive or easy to follow. There was a need for something easy to track… After creating the site on Sunday it already had over 300,000 users.”

The application was created using PHP and frontend JavaScript. It fetches data about Covid-19 rates from NZ’s Ministry of Health websites automatically and syncs this data with population rates across the District Health Boards. Andrew continues to add new features to the site, and last night introduced a cluster selection feature that allows users to identify pocketed areas of outbreak.

Andrew had initially hosted the Covid-19 interactive map on American-owned web hosting platform HostGator; however, quickly saw the need to shift to Umbrellar which has seen the visitor rate reach almost a million.

“Moving it from servers overseas to Umbrellar has really helped with the responsiveness of the site and how it loads. It’s meant I don’t have to worry about hitting max capacity or the site’s stability,” Andrew said of the changeover.

Visit the site at https://covid19map.co.nz.

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