A 17-year-old high school student, Avi Schiffmann has created the world’s biggest coronavirus tracker. nCoV2019.live, developed by him, has been visited by more than 350 million people to date. He rejected the multi-million dollar advertising revenue offer

As coronavirus continuing to expanding across the planet, several websites and smartphone apps have arisen to monitor the latest developments and the number of cases/deaths worldwide. One of those websites is nCoV2019.live. Created by a 17-year-old Avi Schiffmann, more than 350 million people have visited the site to this day.

Schiffmann is an autodidactic coder who launched his website at the end of December last year when coronavirus had not yet been identified outside China. The nCoV2019.live website has been accessed more than 350 million times. After noticing how incredibly difficult it was initially to track coronavirus cases because people were mostly dependent on Chinese government websites, Schiffmann decided to create his own tracker. with over 30 million viewers each day. Schiffmann’s mother told news sources that he was offered an $8 million advertising deal, which he turned down. 

“When I started this website, there were less than 1,000 total cases, they were all in the Wuhan area of China, and there was a lot of misinformation spreading. So I decided it would be cool to create a website and make it a central hub of information,” says Schiffmann while speaking to publications.

He said, “I still want to play video game with my friends.”

He further believes that the success behind his coronavirus tracker website is the development initiative which he took when no one else was talking about it. “I think one of the big things about my website is that not that it’s very hard to program, but that I took the initiative to make this when nobody was talking about this. I hope that what I created inspires a lot of young people to find ways they can help”, Schiffmann added.