Spatial tracking and mapping of coronavirus disease COVID-19

Lt Col (retd) Rasika Kahandagamage RSP

As per WHO - "The COVID-19 virus spreads primarily through droplets of saliva or discharge from the nose when an infected person coughs or sneezes, so it’s important that you also practice respiratory etiquette (for example, by coughing into a flexed elbow)."

Coronavirus is a disease, therefore it is spreading rapidly. GIS is a very good tool or concept to do the assessment of vulnerability. As a GIS personal, I think most of the country's GIS experts developing an application to find out the corona Risk and spatial mapping. Yes, using this technology we can map the patient locations and find out the hotspots.

But my point of view is we can do more using GIS technics. This application, I developed for Sri Lanka is a little bit different. Corona is a disease and it’s not like other viruses, it is speeding very fast. We need to map all the data to the system.

This system maps all the data pertaining to patient and their connections with the relationship, relationship weightage, visited locations, their family members, Population with administration boundaries, habits (Regional, Social, etc), Mobility, etc...

Then the system can generate clusters with the spatial relationship on the map. According to the relationship we can overlay administration boundaries and find out the risk areas, it may be a prediction but accuracy is high.

Result and benefits – Find out alder peoples in risk areas, Risk areas administration boundary level, Analyse cluster to find out a pattern, Because, it is no pint of counting patients locations and map them to a system and do spatial and statistical analysis.

You know it is very difficult to access the data of the patients; Specially their spatial data. But in Iran base on the formal data that unfortunately are not accurate, I am seeking for a rational pattern for its distribution. While I tried to find a relation between its pattern with socio-cultural indicators, yet I could not determine an acceptable relation between them.

The data that is being made available at a global level is extraordinary. Both the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Hub and the Esri data hub provide data on national and in some cases regional incidence. This comes with the dates of first tests. So first, one can track on a weekly basis the expansion of the disease in China by province, showing how it evolved. Second, one can do the same on a global level.

Data is also available by state level in the US and some other countries. While not fine, this gives an idea of the points of introduction and spread. To do more one needs local or at least metropolitan data.

All this permits, first, an epidemic curve that gives a suggestion of the disease's maturation. That's important. And seeing where the disease has engaged, and where it has not (for example, Africa) allows for some predicitions. The latter will depend on the preventive measures being instituted by different countries to slow its introduction and flatten its curve.

In short, the map and its database, when properly arranged, are enormously useful in both profiling COVID-19 incidence and expansion. And, with population figures and perhaps travel data, may help predictively.

Dear Adekunle S. Raji ,

I am willing to share (for what its worth) a few links to some modelling work conducted at the global level regarding the disease.

- CSSE (@JohnHopkins) dashboard: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6 , along with the related modelling development: https://systems.jhu.edu/research/public-health/ncov-model-2/

- A modelling carried by Maraujolab showing how climate can affect the spread of the disease : http://www.maraujolab.com/climate-affects-spread-of-sars-cov-2/

- Wolfram Alpha's take on modelling covid19 : https://wolfr.am/COVID19Dashboard

Hope it brings a useful addition to the discussion.

Spatial tracking and mapping of coronavirus disease COVID-19

Lt Col (retd) Rasika Kahandagamage RSP

As per WHO - "The COVID-19 virus spreads primarily through droplets of saliva or discharge from the nose when an infected person coughs or sneezes, so it’s important that you also practice respiratory etiquette (for example, by coughing into a flexed elbow)."

Coronavirus is a disease, therefore it is spreading rapidly. GIS is a very good tool or concept to do the assessment of vulnerability. As a GIS personal, I think most of the country's GIS experts developing an application to find out the corona Risk and spatial mapping. Yes, using this technology we can map the patient locations and find out the hotspots.

But my point of view is we can do more using GIS technics. This application, I developed for Sri Lanka is a little bit different. Corona is a disease and it’s not like other viruses, it is speeding very fast. We need to map all the data to the system.

This system maps all the data pertaining to patient and their connections with the relationship, relationship weightage, visited locations, their family members, Population with administration boundaries, habits (Regional, Social, etc), Mobility, etc...

Then the system can generate clusters with the spatial relationship on the map. According to the relationship we can overlay administration boundaries and find out the risk areas, it may be a prediction but accuracy is high.

Result and benefits – Find out alder peoples in risk areas, Risk areas administration boundary level, Analyse cluster to find out a pattern, Because, it is no pint of counting patients locations and map them to a system and do spatial and statistical analysis.

Tracking based hotspot mapping

Adekunle S. Raji Ahola，

Good Idea. and the same questions from my angle.I have tried to use the data from the official department, to make a kind of map like the hotspot,see it

https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_the_relationship_between_the_population_scale_of_the_city_and_number_of_the_case

And maybe the interpolation tool from the spatial analyst toolbox can be used to find the regulation among existing conditions.

Hi Chen Xiao Fish

Great one, I have also checked the attached preprint. You know we can discuss this and advanced it to become a huge paper that can be published. If you are interested, you can email me ([email protected]). I will be glad to have a good partnership with you on this. Kindly let me know what you think.

Adekunle S. Raji ok, I have emailed to u.

You can make your own dashboard from ArcGIS Online. You can use data provided by Worldometer and John Hopkins University for accuracy. Your dashboard changes data according to the sources you took the data.

Utsav Poudel

Thank you for your response to my request. However, I will like to know more about spatial projections methods for tracking and projection in terms of spread to specific locations. It may be a spatial numerical method like spline, IDW or any machine learning method. That is the full strength of my inquiry.

Hi, I share this work that has recently been published to us. Hopefully it is of interest to you:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342006630_Spatial_analysis_and_GIS_in_the_study_of_COVID-19_A_review

Cheers

We can able to divide the category of Covid-19 suffered area( high number of cases areas, the high number of death areas), hospitalization for patients, etc with the help of GIS. Many software is available to prepare a map with GIS such as QGIS, ArcGIS, etc.