Member-only story
This 24-Year Old Created a Viral COVID-Tracking Website
Here’s how he did it and how you can too.
Guillaume Rozier is a 24-yeard old computer science student from France.
Early March 2020, as we weren’t yet speaking of lockdowns, Guillaume looked at the COVID-19 tracking website made by Johns Hopkins University.
With the data, he made a graph of France’s evolution of cases and compared it to the evolution of cases in Italy. Doing so, he realized that France was only 10 days behind its transalpine neighbor and that cases were about to explode.
Worried, he distributed the graph to his family and friends and realized they were very interested. Every day, at least one of his acquaintances asked him for an update of the graph.
Annoyed by the constant requests, Guillaume created a landing page and uploaded the graph, making it live. Within a week, he had 20 000 daily visitors.
Somewhat embarrassed by the simplicity of the original website, he made another one with a proper logo, an explicit URL, and other basic information related to the epidemic.
CovidTracker was born. Its popularity exploded.
