On 2020-May-31 16:00:00, covindia.com shut down after nearly 2.5 months of running. This is the email that I sent out to the team and the university management:

Greetings Everyone,

What started out as an idea in a meeting room in the Faculty Office on the first floor on 12th March, 2020 turned into something colossal over the past two months. 11-ish weeks of working relentlessly, persistently and non-stop have culminated into what has been the biggest and most socially impacting project that I have ever been a part of, Covindia. We’ve had plenty of amazing times working together that I’ll cherish for as long as I can. From showing up in that first news article to getting one million views in two weeks to winning tenth place in a hackathon out of 1,500 teams all over India, we sure have come a long way from starting out small with just four people to involving so many people directly and indirectly.

Alas, it is with great sadness that I declare that Covindia is shutting down it’s live tracker and analytics at 4:00 PM on 31st May, 2020. The number of cases in India are increasing everyday by the thousands (soon likely to be ten thousands) and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for the data acquisition team to continue collecting data at this pace. For this primary reason and after much deliberation, we’ve decided that shutting down the live tracker and analytics is the best course of action at this moment in time. We have around 2 and a half months of invaluable data collected every single day by the data acquisition team which stands out from other sites’ data in one very fundamental way. Our team has gone back and updated the cases which were announced without the information of the district of the case. Other sites simply added the numbers to their databases once the district was announced a day or two later to make their total correct but did not update the original records. This lead to incorrect totals of district cases (per day) but still managed to show the total cases (per day) correctly. The aforementioned other sites are beginning to attempt to do what our Data Acquisition team has been doing consistently which has proven to be a humongous effort for the other sites.

A massive thanks is in due course to everyone who is / was a part of this. Without any one of the team members and mentors, I wouldn’t be here writing this email at 1:36 AM. I’d probably be wasting my time playing Minecraft (on our very own custom server - MECCraft) or going through the internet. Instead, I’m sitting here in front of my computer feeling extremely proud to have worked alongside wonderful people on a project that has given back to society.

We also as a team from the bottom of our hearts thank the college (now a University, yay!) for helping us with this. The first Press Release got the ball rolling and after that, the news articles / interviews organized by the PR team was all smooth sailing. Every time an article was published about Covindia, we could see a significant increase in the number of views and users on our site. It truly made a difference and for that we express our gratitude to the college. We’re really proud to be students of MEC and we finally feel like we’ve done justice to the “Leader. Entrepreneur. Innovator.” ​vision.

I really love the quote: “Per Aspera Ad Astra” - Through Hardship to the Stars. Not because it sounds cool to speak Latin, but because it’s something that I live by everyday. We put in hard work and we flew close to the stars.

To the University, thank you for all the support you’ve shown us. To the mentors, thank you for guiding us throughout. To the team, thank you for all the incredible effort you’ve put in.

Sincerely,
IceCereal

Post Script:

The Stats (at the time of writing):

You can check the last snapshot of the website here: The Legacy.

PSA & LPT: Take good care of your eyes.