Not all heroes battling the Covid-19 pandemic wear personal protective eq-uipment.
The Health Ministry's new website (covidnow.moh. gov.my) for data and insights into the nation's Covid-19 situation, unveiled on Thursday, was built by four selfless youths who worked on a voluntary basis.
Website developers Henry Lim, Sheng Han Lim and Roshen Maghhan, as well as designer Calum Lim, have been working with the ministry to help Malaysians understand the pandemic in the country better.
The work was led by the Crisis Preparedness and Response Centre (CPRC), in collaboration with CPRC Hospital and the National Public Health Laboratory.
Sheng Han took to Twitter to share their journey in building the website with the ministry's open data, saying that they were committed to adding more user-friendly features to the page's dashboard.
"We got together and worked with the ministry for over almost a month to build a transparent, easy-to-understand dashboard to better inform the public, organisations and policy-makers on the state of the pandemic.
"The idea behind open data is simple. It is an all-of-society approach to work towards a similar goal. That, for Malaysia, is winning the battle against Covid-19. I am thankful to the ministry, (minister) Khairy Jamaluddin and his team for the opportunity and openness in collaborating with the open data community.
"We hope this project paves the way for more collaborations between the public and private sectors for the greater good in the spirit of transparency and data openness."
He said all data on the dashboard were in the public domain and available on GitHub.
Sheng Han described his team members as talented people.
Apart from the website, COVIDNOW will be made available as an app for smartphones and tablets. It provides information on the country's Covid-19 cases, vaccination progress, death toll, as well as ventilation, intensive care unit and hospitalisation rates.
The ministry said its participation was symbolic of the all-of-society approach to win the Covid-19 war.
Henry said he believed Covid-19 data should be easily accessible to anyone, anywhere.
"It was nice to see the ministry open sourcing its datasets. I was able to develop products that helped people better understand the epidemic in Malay-sia."
Calum said he joined the COVIDNOW project to provide an accessible and visually appealing site that would help Malaysians track the Covid-19 situation.
"I admire the ministry's efforts in curating and publishing its data, and hope it will persist."
Roshen said he was excited to be part of the project and hoped to contribute more to the ministry's good work.
Khairy described the website as a way to "lift the veil of secrecy" in statistics and provide the main data in a more accessible and easily understood manner .
He said the website would be updated at 11.59pm daily, where information such as granular data on active cases and their locations, data on new cases, deaths, vaccination status of patients and the types of vaccines used, the public healthcare system's capacity, as well as the adverse events following immunisation, would be uploaded.