When the Covid vaccines were announced, many wanted to know about their eligibility and where to get one. NBC News was first to provide a place for readers across the country to find if they were allowed to be vaccinated and where they could get vaccinated.
I led the map data side of this endeavor, from its start on Dec. 21 2020 to launch just seven and half weeks later on Feb. 11, 2021. The goal was a nationwide map, organized per state, where a reader could go to get a Covid vaccine. It’s still online.
Covid-19 vaccination locations were sourced from state, county, district, health district and territory health departments. These locations were updated regularly, and every state had a different approach to publishing the locations. This was a 50-state data collection project, done daily.
This project was promoted across the NBC Universal and Comcast footprint. It was translated into Spanish and Mandarin Chinese. We located more than 12,000 places readers could get vaccinated, and published it. Tens of thousands readers signed up for email updates and hundreds of thousands used the site, which won multiple awards, both journalistic and web-at-large.
What I did
- Managed data sourcing, collection, cleaning, ingestion, normalization and publication along with a team of six researchers and multiple data and visual journalists.
- Initiated and landed a signed data-sharing partnership with Boston Children’s Hospital to fill in the gaps in our vaccination data coverage.
- Managed our MapBox relationship.
- I taught teammates how to scrape websites to obtain data, worked with the team on reach-out to the health departments, I wrote scripts and built tools to automate what could be automated.
- I built a bevy of command-line scripts and other technical tools centered on managing our vaccination data.