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COVID-19 Travel Safety Score.md

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The Problem

I want to know how safe it is to travel to a certain place from a COVID-19 perspective, and if it's not that safe there, what I should do to protect myself.

As the world opens up again with the advent of the COVID-19 vaccine, there's a lot of pent-up travel energy that is now being unleashed. Unfortunately, COVID-19 is still a major problem, especially with the Delta variant. We want to create a tool that lets travelers know in a simple, clean, and easy-to-understand way what the "COVID-19 landscape" is like for their travel destinations and what concrete actions they should take to stay safe if necessary.

MVP Requirements

  • User can input a location, aided by a location auto-suggest. You almost certainly want to use the Google Places API for this.
  • Once the user submits the location, you show a COVID-19 safety report for that location. This includes:
    • A qualitive safety rating or recommendation, ideally color coded. Something like "No Precautions Needed", "Few Precautions Needed", "Some Precautions Needed", etc.
    • Average daily case rate per 100,000 over the past 7 days. If you can show a graph instead of a raw number, even better.
    • Infection rate
    • Hospitalization capacity
    • Recommended safety measures. For example, if the case rate is very low, you can just suggest nothing. If case rate is sort of low, maybe just recommend wearing a mask in crowded indoor venues. If the case rate is very high, probably recommend leaning heavily towards outdoor activities.

Best Platform

Web

This would actually be great on mobile, especially as travel and location are very "on-the-go" type things, but you aren't allowed to publish apps related to COVID-19 on the Google Play Store or Apple App Store unless you are an official medical/government entity. So we have to do this on web; the extra space is helpful for web though as this is an information-display app.

Difficulty

Medium

This project has some nice complexity as you will need to make 2 API calls:

  1. Location suggestions, probably through Google Places as mentioned before
  2. COVID-19 data fetch for a certain location

Aside from that, this is a fairly straight-forward local utility app with a big emphasis on clean UI/UX. I consider this on the upper end of easy and the lower-end of medium.

As an American, I don't know much about outside the US, but the US has a lot of good COVID-19 APIs and websites. My favorite one is covidactnow.org.

Possible Extensions

  • Make the tool global. I don't think there's a good API for COVID-19 data with global coverage; it seems like every region has its own API. You will need to stitch APIs together to make this truly global most likely.
  • Working off of the above point, make an aggregate API to create that global COVID-19 data API. So you can turn this into both a back-end project and a front-end project!
  • Travel recommendations based on places that are both popular and relatively low in cases and spread
  • Data and analytics to see where people are looking to go with your app, which you can then use to show "Most popular destinations" or something
  • Safety report sharing
  • MapView so the user can browse locations vs. having to input a specific one
  • Safety report customization so users can see variations of statistics like daily case load over 3 days instead of 7 and stuff like that
  • Different safety recommendations for vaccinated people vs. unvaccinated people (though asking for this information may be... tricky compliance-wise)