A Massachusetts high schooler is trying to help fellow Bay State students and peers across the country monitor the coronavirus risk in their schools this fall.
Shrewsbury High School sophomore William Wu, 15, has created a website that tracks virus cases in Massachusetts school districts — along with K-12 districts in nearly 20 other states.
The Covid-19 School Tracker is a centralized dashboard to help inform students and parents across the country, Wu told the Herald on Monday.
“It’s really important to get data to as many people as possible,” he said. “It’s good to know how many cases are in your school, and if you’re able to stay safe.”
Wu was inspired to launch the website after his sister went off to Georgia Tech in early August — and his mom was constantly checking the daily case counts at the college. His mom was refreshing the college’s coronavirus website more often than social media, he said.
Wu then started wondering if there was data for his school and K-12 schools in general.
“I wanted to know I was safe in a low-risk zone,” he said.
He discovered at first that it was difficult to access the data for many states — and that much of the data was spread apart over multiple websites. The Covid-19 School Tracker has now brought all the available K-12 data under one roof, he said.
“This is really important and helpful information,” said Wu, who’s interested in engineering and used coding to build the site.
All of the data comes from each state’s department of health or department of education.
Other than Massachusetts, the states that Wu is tracking are: New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Kentucky, Idaho, South Carolina, Tennessee, Hawaii, Indiana and Louisiana.
His goal is to get data for all 50 states, Puerto Rico and other territories.
The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, which updates its coronavirus case data every Thursday, so far has reported 259 cases — including three student cases and one staff case in Shrewsbury, Wu’s school district.
Wu has been posting his tracker in some Facebook groups and online community forums, and the response has been positive, he said.
“I’m hoping people can spread the word about this, and get this information out there,” he said. “I want everyone to be able to see this.”
