Some Encouragement in These Strange Times: Tracking Coronavirus Recoveries in Anki (Patreon)

Hey folks,

I hope this post finds you and your loved ones well.

These are tough times we're living through at the moment. Amidst social distancing, quarantine, and all around worry, it can be easy to lose the courage to go through your daily routines. Flattening the curve to fight this disease is absolutely crucial, but to do so it's important that we see a light at the end of the tunnel – something which I feel has become more difficult as grim news articles are trickling in on a daily basis.

On a more proximal level, I feel like this crisis already seems to be having some effects on people's studying morale. I don't know about you guys, but I know that some of my friends have been struggling to keep up with their Anki reviews in the face of unis postponing lectures and exams. The same sentiment seems to be echoed with posts like these over on Reddit.

Seeing all of this evolve over the past few days, I decided to sit down and see if I can somehow confront the situation in the way I usually do: By coding something. More specifically, I wanted to see if I could come up with a technical solution that might help with motivation, even if just by a tiny bit. (And, to be quite honest, I also wanted take my mind off things for a bit.)

This is what I arrived at:

It's called Coronavirus Tracker, and it's a tiny add-on that adds a live count of confirmed recoveries from COVID-19 to Anki's toolbar. Every half an hour or so it checks back with Johns Hopkins' Coronavirus Resource Center to update the count, and as you go through your daily review sessions, you will hopefully see that number rise.

My hope with the add-on is that it will help people persevere through these difficult times by providing an ever-so tiny bit of additional encouragement. I'm not sure how useful this will actually be in the end, but if it just helps one person out there, I feel the effort was worth it.

Coronavirus Tracker is available for free on AnkiWeb starting right away. Since it uses a lot of the fancy additions in recent Anki releases, you will have to upgrade to the just released Anki 2.1.22/23 in order to use it.

I would love to hear your feedback on the add-on, but also on how you guys are dealing with the situation. If you're in school or work, how is your administration/employer handling COVID-19? Do you find it difficult to keep up with your studies/work, or is it more of a silver lining situation?

For me the one positive to come out of this experience has been that I've had a lot more time for coding than usual – you can definitely expect a lot more exciting add-ons over the next few weeks! (starting with Ctrl+F Search and Find and Replace in the Note Editor tomorrow)

In any case, stay healthy, stay safe, and as always best of luck with your studies,

– Aristotelis (Glutanimate)