Avi Schiffmann, a 17-year-old kid from Seattle used web scraping technology to create one of the biggest websites in the world which frequently tracks and updates the numbers of cases of the COVID-19 as it spreads. His website is a huge hit and has seen over 350 million visits by people since its launch in December 2019. In the last 24 hours, the website has been visited by 3 million people. The website scrapes the data from reliable sources from all over the world and then displays it on the website for the users to see.
The website created by Avi shows the stats regarding – Total Confirmed Cases, Total Deceased, Total Serious and Total recovered for the entire globe at a glance and also for different continents and countries separately. On the bottom left there is an option to go to a particular region to see the impact of COVID-19 pandemic in that region.
The website caught everyone’s attention and Avi started getting emails where people were ready to pay him money to put their ads on the website. And one day, Avi got an offer of $8 million dollars to put the ads on his website but Avi turned it down so that he could play games with his friends. He stated, “he did not care that much about making so much money”. He further added by saying, “I’ll just retire now but I don’t want to retire at 17”. Avi also said that,
“I hope that what I created inspires a lot of young people to find ways that they can help”
