How a Johns Hopkins Professor and Her Chinese Students Tracked Coronavirus

Jon Hilsenrath and Jon Kamp:

Lauren Gardner, an associate engineering professor at Johns Hopkins University, was sitting in a school coffee shop with two graduate students in January, chatting about their work on measles, Dengue fever and the Zika virus, when conversation turned to an emerging coronavirus in China.

The students, both from China, wanted to track it, and Dr. Gardner, who researches how transportation systems propagate the spread of disease, was game. They built a website in a day, a Covid-19 dashboard, and after launching it on Jan. 22,…