Development of the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Facilities Status Dashboard for the COVID-19 Pandemic: Approach and Challenges

Abstract

Objectives: Develop a tool for applying various COVID-19 re-opening guidelines to the more than 120 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) facilities.Methods: A geographic information system boundary was created for each EPA facility encompassing the county where the EPA facility is located and the counties where employees commuted from. This commuting area is used for display in the Dashboard and to summarize population and COVID-19 health data for analysis.Results: Scientists in EPA’s Office of Research and Development developed the EPA Facility Status Dashboard, an easy-to-use web application that displays data and statistical analyses on COVID-19 cases, testing, hospitalizations, and vaccination rates.Conclusion: The Dashboard was designed to provide readily accessible information for EPA management and staff to view and understand the COVID-19 risk surrounding each facility. It has been modified several times based on user feedback, availability of new data sources, and updated guidance. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views or the policies of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Visualization of Spatial–Temporal Epidemiological Data: A Scoping Review

“…Of the methods that we observed, the most used was the analysis of task accuracy, applied in 24 studies. Most evaluation methods were applied in works that developed an interactive tool [15,17,[19][20][21]23,25,26,62,63,74,80,85,86,90,91,[93][94][95][96][97]99,[103][104][105]107,109,111,[114][115][116]119,[121][122][123]125]. Out of those that used visualization techniques to communicate data with some sort of interactivity (7/114), only 1 [92] validated its techniques by obtaining users' feedback.…”

“…The studies that used a map-style representation (79/114) adopted different strategies: static geographic 2D or 3D maps [14,15,19,20,22,31,33,36,38,[42][43][44]50,75,81,83,88,93,102,104,107,109,117,118,123], dynamic 2D maps [20][21][22]25,61,65,80,85,89,90,94,97], or choropleth maps [17,23,24,27,30,32,34,35,37,40,46,48,49,52,…”

“…According to our review, more than half of the 114 studies (67/114) used 2D or 3D line charts as depictions of time series to represent temporal data related to a pan-demic. They were not only used to depict the number of cases per week, month, or year [16,21,22,24,25,30,36,50,53,54,56,59,60,62,65,67,68,[71][72][73]75,79,[84][85][86][87]97,98,100,103,104,106,109,113,114,120,121,127] or cumulative cases [22,27,52,55,65,70,71,[98][99][100]105,…”

“…They were not only used to depict the number of cases per week, month, or year [16,21,22,24,25,30,36,50,53,54,56,59,60,62,65,67,68,[71][72][73]75,79,[84][85][86][87]97,98,100,103,104,106,109,113,114,120,121,127] or cumulative cases [22,27,52,55,65,70,71,[98][99][100]105,115] but were also used to depict other disease measures, such as the basic reproduction number…”

“…Some of the studies used more than one technique to depict information concerning time. The most frequent combination was bar charts with line charts [16,30,33,60,67,68,70,71,88,90,97,104,106,120], which comprised 14 out of 35 combinations. Bar charts are particularly useful for comparing certain measures at different levels of temporal granularity to detect any breakdown of time that could influence the appearance of diseases.…”