January 2020 began collecting real-time data for CovidNet, 1Point3Acres' COVID-19 tracker. Initially covering real-time North American data only, it later tracked additional countries. The CovidNet dashboard tracks data at the county level, is interactive, and contains information about how many people got COVID-19 and how many people recovered from it or died from it. While 1Point3Acres full-time employees built the engineering to power CovidNet, volunteers including engineers, professors, and data scientists collected data. In June 2020, 522 groups were using CovidNet, which had garnered over 225million views. By June 2021, it received more than 2.8billion views. Lauren Gardner, who created a Johns Hopkins University dashboard to track COVID-19 data, used 1Point3Acres, which assembles COVID-19 data from multiple media publications. The University of Chicago's Center for Spatial Data Science used 1Point3Acres's data to put together an "interactive visualization" of COVID-19 outbreaks, while Esri used data from 1Point3Acre for its dashboard. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used the 1Point3Acres tracker as one of the its data sources. The Chinese edition of Scientific American in June 2020 called CovidNet "the world's most real-time, extensive, and geographically differentiated COVID-19 tracking platform". An article in Cartography and Geographic Information Science said CovidNet "may possess unique advantages in early reporting of data, but for the most part it has lower disagreement coefficients with other datasets to date". Researchers in the journal IEEE Access discussed a shortcoming of CovidNet, writing, "Another issue is for a display dashboard, the raw data is difficult to access by the public (even it claims the data could be distributed with permission). Hence, it is impossible for users to define the granularity of data, filter the content of data and select the categories of data for customized scholar research." References External links Official website Chinese Internet forums Chinese-language websites Internet properties established in 2009 Websites about the COVID-19 pandemic