Geographic Information and Covid-19 Outbreak Does the spatial dimension matter?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.6092/1970-9870/6850Keywords:
Covid19, emergency response, geographic information, Planning Support Systems (PSS), geodesignAbstract
The Covid-19 pandemic in Europe started its outbreak in Italy in January 2020, and since early March 2020, it rapidly spread in most European Countries with growing diffusion rates. EU Countries applied lock-down measures accordingly. While Government across Europe relied in experts’ advice, scientific advisory teams were often lead by virologists and epidemiologists, and no evidence is easily found about the involvement of experts in spatial planning and design in emergency response. Often in the uncertainty of a new hazard emergency response, lock-down measures were based on national or regional scale planning, applying to large administrative units boundaries with little or no local differentiations.
This paper argues that a large-scale approach may be more effective in emergency response planning and management as it may better take into account local variations. This approach might be an important and still missing step for balancing the conflict between the two most urgent goals in the current emergency response: public health and safety vs economy re-start after the emergency lock-down.
Downloads
References
Campagna, M. (2005). GIS for sustainable development. In Campagna, M. (Ed). GIS for Sustainable Development, CRC Press, Boca Raton https://doi.org/10.1201/9781420037845.ch1
Campagna, M. (2016). Social Media Geographic Information: Why social is special when it goes spatial? In C. Capineri et al. (Eds). European Handbook of Crowdsourced Geographic Information., 45-54. https://doi.org/10.5334/bax.d
Dong, E., Du, H., & Gardner, L. (2020). An interactive web-based dashboard to track COVID-19 in real time. In The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 20, 533-534. Retrieved from: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30120-1
Bashir, M. F., Ma, B., Bilal, Komal, B., Bashir, M. A., Tan, D., & Bashir, M. (2020). Correlation between climate indicators and COVID-19 pandemic in New York, USA. Science of the Total Environment, 728 (1), 1-4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.138835
EEA (2019) Assessing air quality through citizen science. European Environment Agency (EEA) Report No 19/2019. ISSN 1977-8449.
Haklay, M., 2013, Citizen Science and Volunteered Geographic Information –overview and typology of participation in Sui, D.Z., Elwood, S. & M.F. Goodchild (eds.), 2013. Crowdsourcing Geographic Knowledge: Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) in Theory and Practice. Berlin: Springer. 105-122. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4587-2_7
Ponaser, J. (2020) The global effort to expand health care facilities seen from space. Politico 4/8/20, 2:27 PM CET Retrieved from: https://www.politico.eu/interactive/the-global-effort-to-expand-healthcare-facilities-seen-from-space/
Scholz, S., Knight, P., Eckle, M., Marx, S., & Zipf, A. (2018). Volunteered geographic information for disaster risk reduction-the missing maps approach and its potential within the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement. Remote Sensing, 10 (8), 1-7. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10081239
Steinitz, C. A. (2014). A Framework for geodesign. ESRI Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13398-014-0173-7.2
Wilson, M. W., & Graham, M. (2013). Situating Neogeography. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 45, 3-9. https://doi.org/10.1068/a44482
Kamel Boulos, M. N., & Geraghty, E. M. (2020). Geographical tracking and mapping of coronavirus disease COVID-19/severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) epidemic and associated events around the world: How 21st century GIS technologies are supporting the global fight against outbreaks and epidemics. International Journal of Health Geographics, 19 (8), 1-12 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12942-020-00202-8
Abeler, J., Bäcker, M., Buermeyer, U., & Zillessen, H. (2020). Covid-19 contact tracing and data protection can go together. JMIR Mhealth Uhealth, 8(4), 1-5. https://doi.org/10.2196/19359
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish in this journal agree to the following:
1. Authors retain the rights to their work and give in to the journal the right of first publication of the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons License - Attribution that allows others to share the work indicating the authorship and the initial publication in this journal.
2. Authors can adhere to other agreements of non-exclusive license for the distribution of the published version of the work (ex. To deposit it in an institutional repository or to publish it in a monography), provided to indicate that the document was first published in this journal.
3. Authors can distribute their work online (ex. In institutional repositories or in their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges and it can increase the quotations of the published work (See The Effect of Open Access)