Number of COVID-19 cases tops two million across the world

The Johns Hopkins University's interactive, web-based dashboard clicked over two million in the early hours of April 16 in Australia. Just 13 days ago that number was one million.

The project from the Baltimore university's Center for Systems Science and Engineering has filled an information vacuum and provided a comprehensive picture of the virus's global spread since January.

The Hopkins team scrapes their numbers from dozens of sources - including the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the National Health Commission of the People's Republic of China.

It initially began as a China-centric map but as the virus spread exponentially so did the team's commitment to the project.

Ensheng Dong, a first-year PhD student, started with a map of 320 confirmed cases, almost all in China.

That same map now includes 185 countries or regions, total deaths, testing numbers in the US, hospitalisations in the US and, most importantly, the breakdown of recoveries.

Total recoveries across the world is over 500,000 - and includes the 2186 in Australia.

Of course there have been glitches in the system. Witness this tweet:

Servers fell over as demand increased and data that was originally manually input was automated reasonably early on.

The Hopkins dashboard is open-source, made freely available to users.

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