The novel Coronavirus or COVID-19 is spreading like a wildfire around the globe with more 81,000 cases confirmed across all the major countries. The virus, which was originated from Wuhan City, in Hubei province of China has killed more than 6,000 people around the globe.
The novel Coronavirus has also reached the Indian shores with the number of patients going up to 100 in the country. With this, citizens in India and around the globe are being warned to practice proper hygiene and take necessary precautions. But who to track the fast-spreading pandemic around the globe?
Thanks to the technology, there are various websites and applications that allow users to keep real-time track on the novel Coronavirus. However, in this sea of searches, there are some irrelevant links as well. So, in order to make things easier for you, we present you the genuine coronavirus tracking websites and we list out some potential fake websites and apps that can infect your smartphone or PC with malware.
Microsoft Bing
Microsoft Bing has introduced a dedicated portal to track COVID-19 infections around the world. The website is accessible at bing.com/covid and it provides real-time statistics for each country. As per the website, there are a total of 169,657 confirmed cases of Coronavirus out of which 85,379 are currently active, while 77,761 has been recovered. The website lists that there have been 6,517 deaths due to Coronavirus outbreak. The site comes with an interactive App that allows visitors to click on any country and get a specific number of cases along with related articles.
Johns Hopkins University dashboard
The Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University of America has introduced a web-based dashboard to track confirmed cases of coronavirus. The dashboard can be accessed from this link. The dashboard gives real-time information about coronavirus cases. One can check active cases, deaths and recoveries of various countries via an interactive map. The website relies on publicly available data from multiple sources.
World Health Organisation
WHO has termed Coronavirus or COVID-19 as a global pandemic. WHO says that Europe is the epicentre of the pandemic with more reported cases and deaths than the rest of the world combined apart from China. The organisation has made a dedicated website for the Coronavirus The portal gives all the details related to Coronavirus along with other technical guidance and different ways to protect yourself from this pandemic. It has also rolled out a real-time dashboard that tracks all the coronavirus cases around the globe. The dashboard can be accessed from this link. As per WHO, there have been 164,837 confirmed cases of coronavirus in 146 countries and the death toll has reached 6,470.
The HealthMap
The HealthMap is yet another trusted website for tracking the coronavirus cases around the globe. The website has been developed by researchers from the University of Oxford, Harvard Medical School, Boston Children’s Hospital and Northeastern University. The website also provides an animation that shows how the pandemic has been spread across the globe and as per the website, there are 141,401 confirmed cases of coronavirus across the globe.
How to spot the fakes?
Although these are some prime examples of genuine websites that provides you with real-time information about the coronavirus, there are some that maliciously designed to infiltrate your PC or smartphone. Hackers are using the website corona-virus-map.com to use the dashboards to infect a PC with malware. The researchers have found out that the hackers are using these maps to steal information like user names, passwords, credit card numbers and other information stored in the browser.
This is not it. The hackers have also made an Android application that is disguised to track updates on coronavirus pandemic. The app is known as Coronavirus Tracker, which claims to track ‘real-time coronavirus outbreak in your street, city and state’. The website further reveals that the application is certified by World Health Organization along with Centers of Disease Control and Prevention and Department of Education, United States of America.
Researchers from the security firm DomainTools found out that the app is basically a front for ransomware called CovidLock, which changes the lock-screen Password and ask users to pay $100 in BitCoins to unlock it. So, in order to avoid these fake websites, one should always check the coronavirus-related information from the above-mentioned links or from trusted sources like government websites, news media and more.