2.4 MONITORING OF COVID-19 USING GEOPORTALS The rapid spread of the new coronavirus, which has a high rate of contagion, driven by the large circulation of people globally through harbors and airports, ensured a geographical dimension different from that experienced in other pandemics. The few months that separate the detection of Sars-Cov-2 in December 2019 in China, until the pandemic decree by WHO in March 2020, was accompanied by a series of initiatives to monitor the evolution of the disease in space and in time, being one of the best known on a global level the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) (2020) initiative, named COVID-19 Dashboard, which already has more than 1.6 billion unique accesses (MundoGEO, 2020b) and provides information on the evolution of the disease in real-time. The tool presents various information about the evolution of the pandemic, such as active and accumulated cases, deaths, and recoveries in 191 countries and regions of the world. Also, in January 2020, data were collected and processed manually (Dong et al., 2020), with the need to make the tool more automated with the development of the disease. In addition, to provide transparency to the general population, authorities, and researchers regarding the pandemic’s evolution, the initiative makes available for downloading the data used to feed the dashboard in a repository. On these initiatives to monitor the evolution of the pandemic in space in real-time, Silva (2020, ¶ 2) points out that: (...) they are extremely important to inform the population about the contagion of the disease, whether at the local, regional or global level. Thus, it is possible to verify both the evolution of contagion and the occurrence of deaths resulting from infection by COVID-19. Reading and interpreting this scenario provides support for decision making at the government level, such as the adoption of restrictive measures and social isolation8.
8
The original text was translated from Portuguese by the author and can be read at https://mundogeo.com/2020/04/08/artigo-geotecnologias-na-identificacao-de-impactos-sociais-devido-acovid-19/. Retrieved November 11, 2020.
33
