Akeel Rashid

Tracking COVID-19 pandemic in J-K just a click away

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Srinagar: Three Kashmiri Kashmir youth Vikas Bukhari, Mudasir Ali and Haider Ali Punjabi have developed a website dedicated to displaying official Tweets and information related to Covid-19 in Jammu and Kashmir.

The website – covidkashmir.org /lite.covidkashmir.org – went live on 25th March. According to the developers, the website was developed using simple web technologies in order to make it accessible to everyone.

“Our aim is to provide the people of Jammu and Kashmir access to accurate, reliable data even at limited internet speed. Since Mobile Internet Speed is restricted to 2G in Jammu & Kashmir, we are using Google Sheets to store the patient data, which is faster to update and access,” they said.

“Initially, the website only showed the statistics of the patients, Emergency Helplines, and contacts of doctors. Over the coming days, other features and pages like Government Statistics, Frequently Asked Questions, Heat Map of Active Cases, Statistics based Visualisations were added,” said Vikas Bukhari.

“To maintain the accuracy of the data, we only rely on the data released by official twitter handles of Rohit Kansal (@kansalrohit69) (Principal Secretary Planning J&K), Department of Information & Public Relations, J&K (@diprjk) and Newspapers,” he said.

“On 29th March, another version of the website was released. This version is a text-only statistics version, smaller than 1kB. This change was made so that the statistics could be accessed during internet speed drops,” he added.

The developers said they are planning to further improve their website’s speed and also develop a mobile application of the tracker.

 

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