Editor’s Note: Over the past few months we’ve seen an inspiring response to COVID-19 from our community. To thank the organizations that are building tools to help us through, in the coming weeks we’ll highlight some of the many projects our customers have created to support their communities.

The first wave of COVID-19 response efforts we saw from our community of independent developers, non-profit organizations, government agencies and technology companies, was the visualization of virus spread to help the world understand the impact geographically. As communities and businesses reacted to changing consumer behavior and needs, our community responded by visualizing other data points that could help people find essential goods and services. Today we’re sharing a few examples of the websites that use the Maps JavaScript API, marker clustering, and Google Maps Platform place data to help visualize important data and places to support their communities. 

TrackCorona

TrackCorona provides up-to-date, global information to help fight the pandemic. The website, which aggregates data from more than 17 authoritative sources, was created by undergraduates at Stanford, University of Virginia, and Virginia Tech. In addition to providing a detailed visualization of COVID-19’s global presence, the site provides information about the background of the virus, global travel restrictions, a historical timeline of how the virus has spread, and more. Since launch, the site has had over 9,300,000 page views.

Find the Masks

#findthemasks was built by volunteers to connect donors who have personal protective equipment (PPE) to the healthcare facilities, group homes, and shelters most in need of it. By mapping the PPE shortage and providing open data infrastructure, the site supports a wide range of grassroots efforts to move masks, gloves, thermometers, and even baby monitors out of basements to the frontlines where they can protect the workers who are taking care of us. Find a nearby donation site at findthemasks.com.

Iamsick.ca

Empower Health develops technology platforms that help patients find the care they need and help healthcare providers deliver the best quality of service to patients. Their iamsick.ca platform provides a centralized resource for Canadians to easily find family doctors accepting new patients, walk-in clinics, wellness clinics, pharmacies and hospitals–anytime, any day. To help people find locations to receive assessments for COVID-19, they’ve added information about COVID-19 assessment centers to the platform. Assessment centers are noted with a special marker on the map to help people quickly and easily identify the location closest to them. 

They’ve also launched a national COVID-19 information hub at c19.ca, and are supporting Canada's National Institute of Aging at Ryerson University with the launch of the first-known Long-Term Care COVID-19 Tracker in the world. The Long-Term Care COVID-19 Tracker will enable the provision of daily updates of cases and deaths within nursing and retirement homes, particularly in Ontario, to strengthen current front-line efforts to protect residents and care providers in these settings that currently represent the heart of Canada's COVID-19 epidemic.

Takeout Tracker

With many restaurants closing or switching to take out or delivery only, Takeout Tracker aims to give the people of Austin, Texas an up-to-date resource to find open restaurants, their current operating policies, hours, and ordering information. Restaurants can submit their information for expedited listing, but the team also takes user reports and proactively updates as restaurant policies change. The site offers curated lists of recommendations from local industry veterans as well as controls to search, filter, and map their full list of 675+ restaurants.

Not-for-profit developers and organizations working on COVID-19-related websites or apps can apply for Google Maps Platform credits by filling out the application for credits. Our team has also compiled useful resources to help developers better understand core features of Google Maps Platform that can be useful for building apps in our COVID-19 Developer Resource Hub. Next we’ll highlight how a variety of our customers are helping local communities stay engaged even when they’re sheltering in place. 

For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.