Three Kashmir youngsters develop website dedicated to providing COVID-19 information

Three Kashmiri youth 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. As per the developers, identified as Vikas Bukhari, Haider Ali Punjabi, and Mudasir Ali, the website was developed using simple web technologies in order to make it available to everybody.

'Access to exact and reliable data'

“Our goal is to provide the people of Jammu and Kashmir access to exact, reliable data even at restricted 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 quicker to update and access,” said Mudasir Ali.

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“Primarily, the website only showed the statistics of the patients, Emergency Helplines, and contacts of doctors. Over the coming days, additional features and pages like Government Statistics, Frequently Asked Questions, Heat Map of Active Cases, Statistics based Visualizations were added,” he said.

“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.

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“On 29th March, an additional version of the website was released. This version is a text-only statistics version, smaller than 1kB. This modification was made so that 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.

Meanwhile, after the detection of four positive cases from the Chattabal area of Srinagar, the administration has declared it as 'Red Zone'. In a tweet, the district administration Srinagar informed that Chattabal area of Srinagar has been declared 'Red Zone'. "Chattabal has been declared Containment (Red) Zone in view of a cluster of 4 positive cases. Containment zone: Administrative boundary of the residential colony and a buffer zone of additional 5 Km radius," District Administration Srinagar tweeted.

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