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COVID-19 India Rt Dashboard
Project Overview
This open-source repository hosted a fully automated pipeline that calculated and visualized the effective reproduction number (Rt) for every Indian state and union territory. Inspired by Kevin Systrom’s Rt methodology, I adapted the Bayesian updating process to localized datasets and published the output as an interactive Plotly dashboard.
Data & Methodology
- Pulled state-wise case counts from Thejesh GN’s scraped feeds of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, validating for missing or sparse regions.
- Applied a modified Bettencourt & Ribeiro (2008) Bayesian approach with Gaussian process noise to estimate daily Rt values and credible intervals per state.
- Highlighted model caveats, such as unmodeled states with insufficient data and the sensitivity of Rt to reporting anomalies.
Automation & Delivery
- Scheduled GitHub Actions to run every six hours (UTC), refresh datasets, recompute Rt, and regenerate static assets.
- Deployed artifacts to a public dashboard with a net-new historical chart, summary badges, and explanatory copy for policymakers and citizens.
- Archived the project when upstream data feeds became unreliable, keeping the methodology and codebase available for future outbreaks.
Impact
- Cited by outlets such as Deccan Herald and The Print when reporting on localized transmission trends.
- Earned endorsements from epidemiologists and public health leaders including Dr. Giridhar R. Babu and Lipika Nanda for bringing transparent Rt tracking to the Indian context.
- Demonstrated how small civic-tech efforts can combine open data, reproducible modeling, and automation to inform crisis response.
News Coverage
This work was cited in the below news
- How dangerous is COVID-19 in the grand scheme of things, Deccan Herald
- Covid slowing in Maharashtra and MP, shows infection rate analysis of govt data, The Print
Credits
- This work is based on Estimating COVID-19’s Rt in Real-Time By Kevin Systrom
- Special thanks to Thejesh GN for collecting and maintaining the State wise COVID-19 data from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India website.