Prevention is Better than Cure: An Application of Big Data and Geospatial Technology in Mitigating Pandemic

Abstract

COVID-19 has been a severe threat to city's dense ecosystem and has collapsed the urban life. These spread has raised question on urban health infrastructure and coping capacity. To maintain social distance and providing community with essentials is a challenging task for government and city planners in dense urban area. Spatial mapping of resources, patients, medical infrastructure, potential open space, places which can be turned to quarantine centers, etc. has been done using GIS for city of Surat. Larger open spaces within the urban fabric are identified to implement emergency services and evacuation protocols. This tool will defiantly be helpful to the city administration in maintaining the cluster, quarantine tracking of the infected community and flow of daily essential, supply chain in cities with restriction in the infected cluster. Even having better technology to fight against any pandemic, geospatial technology will help to prevent the pandemic to spread further and hence, it is known as prevention is better then cure.

A review of GIS methodologies to analyze the dynamics of COVID‐19 in the second half of 2020

“…On the use of layers on networks and transport flow, we emphasize the topics of road networks for accessibility to health services and the analysis of the change in the flow of vehicles due to lockdown (Bessa & da Luz, 2020 ; Desmet & Wacziarg, 2020 ; Saladié, Bustamante, & Gutiérrez, 2020 ; Shah & Patel, 2020 ; Snyder & Parks, 2020 ; Taiwo, 2020 ; Tao et al., 2020 ; Wan, 2020 ).…”

“…The spatial analysis of COVID‐19 also highlights important advances in technology for spatial and geographical science research, for example, the development and consolidation of new spatial analysis software such as GeoMEDD (Curtis et al., 2020 ) and OSMnx (Boeing, 2020 ); new models for risk estimation (Chatterjee et al., 2020 ; Mobaied, 2020 ; O'Sullivan et al., 2020 ; Sun, Di, et al., 2020 ); algorithms for the management of spatial big data (Buscema et al., 2020 ; Fang et al., 2020 ; Li, Li, et al., 2020 ; Shah & Patel, 2020 ); new clustering techniques and automated spatial statistics (Curtis et al., 2020 ; Fang et al., 2020 ; Melin et al., 2020 ); effective new forms of COVID‐19 mapping on the web (Ghilardi et al., 2020 ; Graves & He, 2020 ; Maharjan et al., 2020 ); novel UAV applications (Okyere et al., 2020 ; Sahraoui, Korichi, Kerrache, Bilal, & Amadeo, 2020 ); and utilization of VGI (Hohl et al., 2020 ; Rossman et al., 2020 ; Yoneoka et al., 2020 ), among others.…”

Application-Based COVID-19 Micro-Mobility Solution for Safe and Smart Navigation in Pandemics

“…After having been affected adversely by pandemics of the scale of COVID-19, major transport services remain suspended and the commuters are left with cycling and pedestrian mode for small distance commute [50,51]. Further, Delhi is a cosmopolitan city with people from various states of India living here, and given the byzantine street network, everyone cannot know where the connected street to a place is and how far off is that place using those streets.…”

PREFACE on the Special Issue ‘Technologies for Fighting COVID-19’

“…Mallik et al ( 2020a ) developed an App for tracking the movement of ambulances with infected patients and for helping the traffic police to trace the movement of such ambulances. Shah and Patel ( 2020 ) described the use of geospatial technology for mapping open spaces, such that these could be turned into quarantine centers if required. The tool can be useful for tracking supplies to an infected center.…”