The life of a pioneering coronavirus tracking center is coming to a close.
Johns Hopkins University announced it would end its live data collection and reporting efforts for its widely used Coronavirus Resource Center on March 10.
The site has been a go-to resource for millions of people around the world since the early days of the pandemic.
The site launched in January 2020 and featured a popular map that quickly became an essential tool for many journalists, researchers, and policymakers to track the spread of the virus around the globe.
The map provided real-time reporting data on confirmed cases, deaths, and hospitalizations. It also tracked other key metrics, such as virus recoveries and vaccination rates.
"Following consistent declines in public reporting of pandemic data from U.S. states and the expansion of the federal government’s data capacities, the CRC’s world-leading, comprehensive pandemic data will be archived to ensure it remains accessible to the global research and response community," Johns Hopkins said in a statement.
All pandemic data will remain free and accessible to the public. There just won't be any further updates after March 10.
"After three years of round-the-clock work building and maintaining a 24/7 global resource, we have reached the appropriate time to close this chapter of our response and look to other ways to keep the public safe and informed," said Lauren Gardner, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering. "But if we're needed again, we stand ready and willing to serve."
Updates to the resource center are ending one day before the three-year anniversary of when COVID-19 was first classified as a global pandemic by the World Health Organization.
In the meantime, other organizations such as the WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will continue to provide their own COVID-19 data and tracking resources.
