The last month has probably been the most eventful month in my life thus far… School has moved to a distance learning program, IB exams have been cancelled, I heard back from all the colleges I applied to and decided which one I’d be attending next year and while all this has been happening to me, the world and life as we know it has been threatened by the deadly COVID-19 virus. Amidst all this rapid change and uncertainty, I have tried to keep busy, and stay occupied to ensure that I stay productive. This post will outline some of the ways in which I have managed this over the course of the last month.

Learning and Writing

Although COVID-19 has wreaked havoc across the world since late last year, it has also proven to be a unique learning opportunity to acquire completely new information about subjects like epidemiology and also to apply the knowledge I have gained over the course of the last few years in areas like Economics. I had been following the news related to the virus ever since its inception, yet what I found most interesting was the analysis of the virus’s impact on economies worldwide, which began to hit the headlines sometime in early March. So when school closed its campus on Thursday the 12th of March and began preparing its Distance Learning Program for the following Tuesday, I decided to take my mind off the uncertainty of the future by writing a short analytical piece about the economic impact of COVID-19.

At this point IB exams were yet to be cancelled and I knew I should be studying, so I justified the couple of hours I spent writing this piece as practice for my upcoming Economics Paper 1 and 2. My goal was to apply the Economics knowledge I had to the environment at the time and explain the consequences of COVID-19 that we had already begun seeing to a complete layman with little or no knowledge in Micro or Macroeconomics. I spent a couple of hours planning and writing the piece, and published it the piece entitled, “COVID-19: The Economic Impact Simplified”, on my personal blog before I went to bed that Friday. Although I hadn’t expected it once I shared the piece on social media, it started gaining traction and by the following Thursday it had been published as a full page opinion column piece on Sri Lanka’s primary Financial newspaper: The Daily Financial Times. The article has received over 2000 hits on the DailyFT’s website and no doubt been read by thousands more on the print edition.

Since then, the impact of COVID-19 on the world has only kept growing exponentially and I have been reading quite a few books and articles and attending some webinars hosted by universities and financial institutions to gain a better understanding of the situation and continue learning. Although I haven’t produced anything since the first article I wrote a month ago, I plan on writing a few more pieces over the course of the next few weeks since the economic environment has changed so much since then and there’s much more to analyse and share. I am currently working on a piece about the impact COVID-19 is having on inequality and a sequel to my first piece that dissects the economic developments that have transpired since the first piece that was published a month ago.

The COVID-19 Dashboard

In my attempt to learn about the latest developments, I couldn’t help but notice how difficult it was to understand the full picture of what was going on. I found myself moving between numerous data dashboards, and media outlet websites and apps in order to gain all the information and understand the development of COVID-19. Furthermore most of these websites and dashboards weren’t very user friendly on mobile and I had to keep opening up my computer to get all the information. All this hassle led to the idea of developing my own COVID-19 dashboard that would be very user friendly and contain not only live data about the disease, but also relevant news from media outlets and important information about things like grocery delivery services. However, when this idea first came to me back in early March, IB exams hadn’t been cancelled yet and I knew I didn’t have the time to spend on such a development project. All this changed on a Sunday evening almost three weeks ago, when I found out that for the first time in a very very long time, the IB would be cancelling the May 2020 examination session.

This cancellation was probably the biggest impact that COVID-19 has had on my life thus far and everything seemed very uncertain after hearing this information. Getting all this information so suddenly, after two years of hard work towards these examinations I found myself feeling both disappointed and searching for a way to bring back some meaning especially to my intellectual life. Now that exams had been cancelled, I spent the next three days bringing my vision for a COVID-19 dashboard to life. It took me a couple of days to find reliable data sources and build a backend that would regularly pull the data and information that would be displayed on my dashboard. Then, I built a web app that simply talked to this backend got the necessary data, news and information and displayed it all in a very visually appealing and easy-to-use dashboard that worked seamlessly on both desktop and mobile devices.

Although some of the information on the dashboard was tailored to a Sri Lankan audience, it has gained over 2000 users in the last few weeks who regularly check the dashboard everyday. You can access the dashboard by simply visiting https://anuda.me/covid-19 on any web browser. Seeing this great response, I am currently working on adding forecasts to the website that would give users a rough idea of how the virus will spread in the future based on historical data.