New West dad builds COVID-19 school exposure website

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) — Parents in B.C. who want to know about the latest COVID-19 exposures at their kid’s school now have another tool in their arsenal, as a father in New Westminster has created a website that sends text notifications.

Gabriel Bauman, a software engineer, started exposure.watch earlier this week. The website pulls information from a B.C. school COVID tracker Facebook page, and brings it together in one easy-to-find place.

“The goal is just to build the tool that I would have wanted the government to build,” Bauman said. “I’m still not sure why they haven’t done more.”

In the first few days after launching, the site saw 10 searches a second, and thousands of text alert subscriptions.

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“You search for the name of your kids school, and you’ll get a page that gives you a red, yellow, green, kind of status on recent exposures of that school. And if you choose, you can send us a text message to sign up for text notifications.”

So far, more than 4,000 people have signed up to receive notifications.

“It costs me about $200 a month to run the thing, and took me about 40 hours to build it.”

He says the provincial government doesn’t make it easy for parents to find out information about exposures in schools.

“The issue is that their websites are just so poor, they’re so difficult to get information from in an automated way. And I’d really like to see a better, and more useful, set of information from the government.

“The last year kind of waiting, watching, looking to see what the government was going to was going to do to keep everyone informed and it seems like keeping us informed is maybe not the priority, getting keeping everyone going to school seems to be more of the priority.”

Bauman says he does hope to eventually expand beyond schools, and list exposures at other places including businesses.

“Reaction seems uniformly positive. Everybody seems kind of excited to be able to just stop digging and start being notified.”