A desire to help his grandfather navigate news and information about COVID-19 led a Saratoga High School student to create what he couldn’t find: an aggregate website for those on similar searches.
Aarav Badani, who will be a sophomore at Saratoga High next year, says his grandfather lives alone in India.
“I thought it would be of significant help to him to aggregate all the information he would need,” Aarav says. “My intention was to find a website that he could refer to.”
Finding none, Aarav created FixCovid.org to compile information and news about COVID-19, including vaccines and treatments.
“After creating the website,” he says, “I realized that he could not completely understand it in English, so I added a feature that let him and others change it to a few other languages, such as Hindi, Gujarati, Spanish and Chinese.”
Aarav says he vetted the websites he aggregated for factual correctness.
“For example, in the information section, I used a map that gets all of its data from the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization,” he says. “In addition, the information in the vaccines and treatment sections is from the WHO’s weekly report.”
The teen has updated the news section of his website to make sure he’s linking to sources that keep up on the most recent pandemic developments. He updates information about vaccines and treatments when the WHO releases its weekly report.
“Over time, I have also added support for more languages and information on masks,” Aarav says.
He believes that having these sites aggregated on one website will help users find more correlations between the data, and to follow the development of vaccines and treatments.
“One interesting correlation that can be made is comparing the countries where the infection rate is declining vs. countries where infection rate is on the rise,” he says. “This allows users to get an idea about what to expect if they take similar preventative measures” as the former group.
To that end, https://fixcovid.org has an entire page devoted to FAQs on masks.
