Interactive SARS-CoV-2 dashboard for real-time geospatial visualisation of sewage and clinical surveillance data from Dhaka, Bangladesh: a tool for public health situational awareness

Abstract

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, many dashboards were created to visualise clinical case incidence. Other dashboards have displayed SARS-CoV-2 sewage data, largely from countries with formal sewage networks. However, very few dashboards from low-income and lower-middle-income countries integrated both clinical and sewage data sets. We created a dashboard to track in real-time both COVID-19 clinical cases and the level of SARS-CoV-2 virus in sewage in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The development of this dashboard was a collaborative iterative process with Bangladesh public health stakeholders to include specific features to address their needs. The final dashboard product provides spatiotemporal visualisations of COVID-19 cases and SARS-CoV-2 viral load at 51 sewage collection sites in 21 wards in Dhaka since 24 March 2020. Our dashboard was updated weekly for the Bangladesh COVID-19 national task force to provide supplemental data for public health stakeholders making public policy decisions on mitigation efforts. Here, we highlight the importance of working closely with public health stakeholders to create a COVID-19 dashboard for public health impact. In the future, the dashboard can be expanded to track trends of other infectious diseases as sewage surveillance is increased for other pathogens.