In early March, UC Berkeley coders, engineers and entrepreneurs joined together to launch mobile platforms that aim to provide reliable information about the spread of COVID-19, colloquially known as the coronavirus.

When campus senior and LoopChat co-founder Jason Li realized that the COVID-19 outbreak would likely grow worse, he saw an opportunity: There was a demand for accurate data that would help community members properly assess their risks. On March 3, Li and his team launched their website, LiveCoronaUpdates.org.

“We found it difficult to get information or data about what was going on,” said Taurai Chinyamakobvu, director of operations for LoopChat. “We knew the pandemic started in China, but it was difficult finding the statistics — especially on a state-by-state basis, but also a country-by-country basis.”

The website, which has about 340,000 views as of press time, offers a comprehensive look into the trends of the disease. The website records the latest confirmed and recovered domestic and international cases of COVID-19, as well as the disease’s death count. It also breaks down the disease counts by state and by global region and has a travel alert and a news headline section. The website aggregates data from the World Health Organization, or WHO, local governments and major news outlets.

Chinyamakobvu said LoopChat will further develop the capacity of its COVID-19 updates website within the next few days, particularly in regard to its “group chat” function, which allows individuals to access and share community updates.

“In different communities, there is a demand for coronavirus platforms where people can keep in contact and keep each other updated by way of seeing what’s going on in the community,” Chinyamakobvu said. “Especially in the UC Berkeley area, there is a shelter-in-place decree, and people have to work from home — when you’re indoors, you need developments about what’s happening in different places.”

What started as a platform designed for policymakers has now become a resource for companies, officials and members of the public, according to Chinyamakobvu. The company currently has a team of six but intends to increase that number because of the global demand for its information.

Li and his team are not the only students who have developed technologies to better address the spread of the disease. Junior Anupam Tiwari and sophomore Anushka Purohit recently founded CoronApp. The two later connected with a group of MBA and undergraduate software development students at a coffee meetup for Haas School of Business entrepreneurs to further develop the app.

CoronApp uses COVID-19 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Johns Hopkins University and the WHO. The mobile browser application features interactive red dots that reflect the most updated number of COVID-19 cases in major cities, states and countries across the world.

“Our aim was to make an application that everyone and anyone, regardless of age or location, could use,” Purohit said in an email. “The future plan is to create a localized dashboard for hospitals, allowing them to input information on the number of people who have come in to be tested, and how many of those tests were positive or negative. … We also want to make it future proof so that if, God forbid, there is another such outbreak, people know how to face it.”