My Hunter Region COVID-19 website

Back in 2021, COVID-19 cases were beginning to creep up again in New South Wales. As part of the response, The Hunter New England Health site published venue locations where an infected person was present, and anyone who was there had to get tested and isolate until a negative result. While this sounds like a simple process, considering they had to contact all affected venues anyway, many people were frustrated at how long it took for some exposure sites to be published. Some listings were only added days after the business themselves shared the details, and in that time any infected person may have already infected others.

The site

So, over roughly three days, I created a simple site where I collated the exposure sites myself and displayed a map and table of all exposure sites in the past few weeks. At the time there was a Reddit thread on r/newcastle where commenters would share the reports, which I would manually add to the site. In addition, I regularly checked the official site to see if any new listings were added.

The site was very simple. A single page, no JS frameworks, just Bulma for styling and Leaflet for the map. While I wouldn’t exactly describe it as pretty, it got the job done. On August 11th I published the site and shared it on Reddit, and it was an immediate hit.

Analytics

On its first day, the site got over 1000 unique visitors, largely thanks to the Reddit post. For the next few months, I continued to add new exposures, and maintained a few hundred daily visitors, until eventually vaccination caught up and venues stopped being published.

My Insights

• You can create a successful programming project with only a few days of work
• If you or someone you know has a problem, chances are there’s many others that do too, and creating a service to solve these problems is a great strategy
• Simple designs are fine (not one person complained about style!)
• You don’t need genius unique ideas, doing something better is a perfectly viable strategy