In 2021, McKinnon students Jack Graffeo and Wesley Mu (current Year 12 students), developed one of Australia’s most popular COVID-19 tracking websites, CovidBaseAU (https://covidbaseau.com/).

Created to simplify and improve the communication of COVID-19 data, it quickly amassed nearly 55,000 followers on Twitter and has been acknowledged and celebrated worldwide, including by then-Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton.

The Melbourne School of Population and Global Health at Melbourne University recently recognised these students. Jack and Wesley were also awarded the Wisdom and Service badge at the General Assembly. Congratulations on this well-deserved recognition!

Michael Kan

Principal

MELBOURNE SCHOOL OF POPULATION AND GLOBAL HEALTH VISIT

On Thursday 11 July, Wesley Mu and myself, Jack Graffeo (Year 12) and together with our friend Darcy Hersbach, were invited to the University of Melbourne School of Population and Global Health to provide a presentation on our Covid-19 data project CovidBaseAU. This was one of Australia’s most popular COVID-19 tracking websites, acknowledged worldwide and referenced in numerous publications.

We began the day by providing a presentation to Epidemiology and Biostatistics researchers about our Covid-19 data tracking project CovidBaseAU, as well as discussing how we feel health data should be best presented by the federal government and answering how we think we can increase interest in public health amongst young people. We also offered our experience about the different challenges we faced and what we learnt from managing the project.

We were very grateful to the University which presented us Certificates of Outstanding Achievement recognising our contribution to public health during the pandemic. We also took questions from various researchers such as Professor Tony Blakely and Professor Nancy Baxter, discussing issues like the reporting and accessibility of public health data.

Following this, we toured the campus meeting with and talking to numerous different researchers, and learning about the different health issues they are working on. We are very grateful to Dr Andrew Lau (Lecturer in Epidemiology) and Dr Anurika De Silva (Senior Research Fellow Biostatistics) who facilitated our visit and introduced us to the different researchers who we were able to meet.

We are very grateful to the University for offering us this opportunity to visit, providing us an insightful and valuable experience in which we learnt a lot about public health issues.

Jack Graffeo and Wesley Mu

Year 12 Students

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