In the beginning it was a lifeline, an organized collection of facts amid a swirl of coronavirus uncertainty and misinformation.
“Feels like this is going to be another day where it’s a battle to do anything while staring at the Johns Hopkins dashboard,” an editor in Michigan tweeted on April 13, 2020, along with a screenshot of the global death toll to date at that time: 114,983.
Nearly 2 1/2 years later, more than 6.5 million people have died from COVID-19, hundreds of millions of infections have been recorded, and Lauren Gardner, the Johns Hopkins engineer who led the creation of the university’s lauded COVID-19 dashboard, has been recognized with a major prize.
