Abstract
This chapter deals with some technical aspects of the spatial strategy for overcoming the huge challenges posed by the pandemic. The focus of this chapter is to highlight the use of GIS tools and positioning technologies in diverse contexts to manage the threat of COVID-19. For this task, three stages of analysis are proposed. In a first preventive stage, some governments applied socioeconomic criteria drawn from existent statistical information to spatially identify the areas with a clear predisposition toward the accelerated spread of the contagion. In a second stage, when the pandemic fully reached a rapid pace of expansion and lockdown measures became necessary, the technologies helped to monitor the most affected areas and to establish a dashboard deployment for visualizing the severity of the catastrophe. In the third stage, after the establishment of control and mobility protocols, different governments resorted to mobile phone positioning as a resource for monitoring quarantine compliance and recognizing if social group behavior entailed any evident risk or spread.
TopBackground
Ever since John Snow’s initial mapping of the emergence of Cholera in 19st Century, spatial referencing has been used to identify specific areas which are more affected by pandemics and diseases. Nevertheless, the incorporation of space in the tracking the health condition dates from the Italy struggle against plagues in 1694 and some evidence exists of its applications in tracking diseases such as yellow fever, cholera and influenza in 1918 (Boulos & Geraghty, 2020).
The breaking threat coming from the COVID-19 pandemic has overwhelmed the previsions and the capacity of response in practically all countries. The number of fatalities and the saturation of medical facilities challenged the health systems in the advanced world, and in the poor countries, the pandemic confirmed the precarity of physical resources and skills. Facing an ominous landscape, the world turned to the possible solutions emerged from the innovations and technologies. Particularly in terms of GIS technologies the advantages of having accurate positioning of individuals and their displacements, using coordinate systems are worthy when the social distancing and isolations can determine the interruption in the spread of the pandemics. Besides, the overlapping of layers allows combining the visual information of a diversity of socio economic and public health variables.
The rendering tools are crucial in the GIS approaches, but simultaneously the feeding of the attribute tables is the backbone for implementing the data update and for feed the system in real time. There can be entered the values of variables that finally are deployed for visualization and analysis. On the other hand, the tracking technologies can be used as a key assessment tool of restrictive measures, because the cause-and-effect procedure can ascribe spatially localized specific results to a set of policy measures previously implemented.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Dashboard: A configurable web app with full visualization and handling of layers, charts, figures, statistics, time series and so on, intended to follow up the evolution of COVID-19 pandemics, either at a local level and for some cases, at a global level.
Lockdown: The mandatory restriction to the outdoor displacements and commutation for preventing the direct contact with non-familiar people.
GIS (Geographic Information System): An informatic and conceptual framework for rendering a diversity of human, social, environmental, and natural phenomena by means of overlapped maps arranged as layers.
Curfew: Is the mandatory order to remain indoors with the clear prohibition to stay in the street for public convenience.
Tracking: The set of strategies for tracing the route described by individuals in their spatial displacements.
Rendering: The noticeable visualization of a GIS process in terms of maps, layers, or images.
Imagery: The set of captured images by means of orthographic process or satellite image procedure.