Guillaume Rozier is 24 years old, he has been a graduate engineer for only 6 months and followed by more than 36,000 people on the social network Twitter, including the Minister of Health Olivier Véran. He is the founder of CovidTracker and when you type his name into Google you get around 600,000 results.

A data tracker!

CovidTracker is a popular site with its 10 million views recorded in January. This site is a citizens’ initiative, an intuitive and educational tool for monitoring the epidemic and the vaccination campaign.

It is in Savoy, and more particularly, in the small village of Planaise, that Guillaume, this gifted, is confined in the family home, far from his Parisian apartment.

“It was from my room that I developed CovidTracker and that we create new functionalities on a daily basis…. Here on the left, for example, we have the database provided by SPF with the number of people admitted in each case. In the middle we have an algorithm that I have developed which will use this data to generate data visualizations and on the right we have the result which is therefore a graph which shows the number of admissions each day, in France “.

A student’s curiosity

Initially Guillaume never had the ambition to create CovidTracker, it was a curiosity of a student in computer engineering school, specializing in big data. It happened very gradually, last March he shared a graphic with his family and friends. Then they asked him for updates and new visualizations.

Guillaume then created a site which became CovidTracker. Today it offers information by region, by department but also tools such as Vaccine Planner, to estimate in a personalized way the date on which you could be vaccinated.

The objective is to make very obscure things accessible to the general public.

A hobby that takes time

Guillaume spent his evenings, his weekends on this site since he tele-works in parallel. This volunteer work took him a lot of time, luckily he is no longer alone and other passionate volunteers joined him. They are 9 to date. They come from all over France and have never seen each other except through a screen.

Their work serves as a reference and CovidTracker is consulted by some hospitals, Olivier Véran even picked up his phone to congratulate Guillaume.

Media solicitations

In a few months, he went from total anonymity to almost daily media requests.

“I didn’t think that one day I would speak in public, I did not imagine that one day I would be on a TV set, it surprised me a lot, it changed me a lot. at one year i was much more shy, now i think i’m more comfortable.

For example, I have a lamp that is used to illuminate me for my media interventions, so I can put my phone and film myself, I have better quality lighting. I also had to buy makeup to erase my skin and make it look less shiny.

A passion for numbers

Marc, the father, is an engineer, Sylvie, the mother is a physics teacher in preparatory class and the creation of this website does not surprise them at all.

“He always had this interest in numbers. Very young he had a weather station, it was not to frog and predict the weather for the next day, it was really to get the data, process it and then show by posting them on websites, he was a teenager…

Guillaume, a very upright person, he does not ride for anyone… He has his autonomy and his very demanding side with himself and humble. What he does he does with all his soul, all his competence and that is what is important “.

Guillaume is happy to contribute to a better understanding of the health crisis but he hopes very quickly to be able to eliminate CovidTracker, that would mean the end of the epidemic!