Microsoft launches a new Coronavirus tracker via Bing

Microsoft recently launched a new interactive map which tracks the spread of the novel coronavirus or COVID-19 across the world. Launched through Microsoft Bing, this Live Dashboard can be found at bing.com/covid. The map intricately details the number of cases per country and then further breaks it down into three categories - Active Cases, Recovered Cases and Fatal Cases. The tracker also provides an array of related news articles and videos for each individual country; or state (in the case of the US). Verge, however, noted that the news stories being displayed for every country aren't usually very timely since many of them link to rather outdated news stories.

The site also mentions that it collates the information from a couple of sources such as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), World Health Organisation (WHO) and Wikipedia. The site uses a heat map, in the form of red circles, to relay the degree of COVID-19 spread across the globe. Simply hovering your mouse over a country will bring up the numbers of currently infected, cured and fatal cases. The dashboard works on PCs, tablets and mobile phones.

The user interface and design look quite similar to the abundance of novel coronavirus trackers found online these days. It is simple and quite user-friendly across commonly-used platforms. Google, on the other hand, also recently launched a website called Project Baseline, built by Verily, which also aims to inform and educate people about the novel coronavirus or COVID-19.