Avi Schiffmann has been falling behind his classmates on school work, but he has a good excuse. The 17-year-old U.S. high schooler is the creator of one of the most visited coronavirus trackers in the world, which he says now takes up “100 percent” of his free time.

The coronavirus pandemic doesn’t look like it will be over any time soon, and Schiffmann plans to continue actively tracking it until the end. As long as the site is up, he says he will keep working at it and adding new features. Once the pandemic is safely over, he’ll take the servers down, and maybe make a page that compares COVID-19 to SARS or the Spanish flu. He thinks it might be a historical piece of the coronavirus people can look back on.

Schiffmann’s coronavirus tracker is a one-stop shop for all the information about COVID-19 the average person might want to know. It constantly updates with statistics for countries around the world on infections, deaths, recovered, and rates of change using data scraped from the WHO, CDC, and other government websites. The site frequently offers new features, like the new survival rate calculator. It also has infections broken down on a map, and pages with some basic information about the virus, including tips for hand hygiene and a list of symptoms.

While Schiffmann is proud of the work he’s done, he doesn’t want to become a model for how to make a name for one’s self during a pandemic. “In the future, I hope pressure is on the WHO to make a tool like this,” he said. “The responsibility shouldn’t be on some random kid.”

And it is a big responsibility. He estimates that he’s put at least a few hundred hours into the site, one time staying up 50 hours straight. “It’s taken over my life,” he told Business Insider in an interview, though he was quick to add that he will “gladly take on the pressure.”

The dashboard is really popular, with about 30 million visitors a day, and 700 million total so far, so it’s unsurprising that Schiffmann has gotten offers to put ads on the website. One offer in particular would have contracted Schiffmann to keep up the site for US$8 million, which he turned down, and he says he likely could have made over US$30 million if he’d put up his own ads, but he says that’s not the goal of the site.

“I’m only 17, I don’t need US$8 million ... I don’t want to be a profiteer,” he said. At first, he was almost reluctant to talk about ads, which he says everyone asks about. Then, he explained his reasoning.

Schiffmann said that he didn’t want popups ruining the user interface, which would be something out of his control if he sold the site. He doesn’t want to be contractually obligated to keep up the site, or to make changes that he doesn’t agree with. Specifically, he knows many of his visitors from around the world don’t have very fast Internet connections, so adding on ads and trackers would slow the site down and maybe even make it unusable for them.

“I don’t want it to leave a stain on things in the future ... people think I’ll regret that decision, but I plan to do many things in the future.” Schiffmann has big plans for his future. He’s already gotten job offers, including one from Microsoft, but he isn’t interested in accepting one of those jobs now. Instead, he cares more about the connections he’s made from the project. “Now I know a ton of VCs and investors ... if I started a company tomorrow, they’d at least read my business plan.”

For his dream connection, Schiffmann says that he’d like to talk to Bill Gates, and he’s especially interested in the intersection of technology and public health.

(SD-Agencies)