KUALA LUMPUR: The CovidNow portal launched by the Health Ministry last month reflects the "whole-of-society" approach that the country has adopted to combat Covid-19.
Crisis Preparedness and Response Centre (CPRC) head of data Dr Mahesh Appannan hailed the portal that presents daily reports on vaccination progress, Covid-19 deaths and hospitalisation rates, among others, as "a quality dashboard that is on par with developed nations".
"The data presented on the CovidNow portal is way above the benchmark (for Covid-19 data reporting) that many countries have.
"We have also revamped the entire page reporting on Covid-19 deaths recently and we will hold another engagement session on this matter soon.
"Our biggest challenge at CPRC in developing this website is to break the norm on data transparency.
"Thankfully, we have enablers in the top management of the Health Ministry that made this possible," he told reporters during a media engagement session via Zoom today.
Dr Mahesh said the CPRC will also consider publishing more data for other diseases on Github based on feedback gathered from the current sharing of data related to Covid-19.
He also thanked the four co-developers of the CovidNow portal who joined him in the Zoom session and commended them for their contribution to the country's fight against the pandemic.
Website developers Henry Lim, Sheng Han Lim and Roshen Maghhan, as well as designer Calum Lim, shared their journey and experience in developing the CovidNow website for almost one month.
Sheng Han said the open data community was very impressed when the Health Ministry started using Github – an open source platform – to disseminate data related to Covid-19 as it demonstrated the ministry's commitment to data transparency.
"Every single bit of data that is entered or altered will be stored in the history of a project.
"From our point of view, it is impressive to see the ministry shift to open data platforms such as Github to share and update data related to Covid-19 on a daily basis.
"Instead of just publishing the data, the ministry also created a platform (CovidNow portal) for the public to visualise the data and the key indicators to drive the correct narrative.
"For me, our biggest challenge in this journey is to decide on the best way to present data for people to understand easily. This includes the type of charts, choice of colours and other aspects," he said.
Sheng Han and his team members also pledged to help the ministry to maintain and upgrade CovidNow whenever possible, as long as the website remains relevant to society.
Meanwhile, Henry said he and his team members had to work on maintaining the website after office hours or during weekends since all of them have day jobs.
Roshen said the team refused to accept any monetary token for developing the website as they wanted to genuinely contribute to the nation's fight against Covid-19.
"We built the website for free because we do not have deep pockets (to make monetary contributions). So, we decided to do something for the nation with our skill sets," he said.