The world is facing an extraordinary crisis as the COVID-19 virus is infecting people from every country, closing borders and businesses and threatening the global healthcare infrastructure. While global pandemics are not a new phenomenon, we have never had better technology to track and treat the crisis that we do today. To understand the pandemic, we need to first identify and track the disease. While challenges in testing for COVID-19 exist in every country, once confirmed, it has been mapped by multiple organizations to help researchers and policymakers understand how to treat the disease and protect the citizens of Earth. Here are some of the organizations that are shedding light on this pandemic.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health and is the leading global organization tracking the pandemic. It is part of the U.N. Sustainable Development Group. The WHO Constitution, which establishes the agency’s governing structure and principles, states its main objective as ensuring “the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health. It is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, with six semi-autonomous regional offices and 150 field offices worldwide.
The World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergency Dashboard is a platform that aims to share information about public health events and emergencies. The data on the dashboard is refreshed every fifteen (15) minutes and data is accurate as at the time of refreshing.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the leading national public health institute of the United States. It is a United States federal agency, under the Department of Health and Human Services, and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.
CDC is responding to an outbreak of respiratory illness caused by a novel (new) coronavirus. The outbreak first started in Wuhan, China, but cases have been identified in a growing number of other locations internationally, including the United States. In addition to CDC, many public health laboratories are now testing for the virus that causes COVID-19.
In response to this ongoing public health emergency, Johns Hopkins Center for System Science and Engineering developed an interactive web-based dashboard (static snapshot shown above) hosted by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University, to visualize and track reported cases in real-time. The dashboard first shared publicly on January 22, illustrates the location and number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, deaths, and recoveries for all affected countries. It was developed to provide researchers, public health authorities and the general public with a user-friendly tool to track the outbreak as it unfolds. Further, all the data collected and displayed is made freely available, initially as google sheets, now in a GitHub repository, along with the feature layers of the dashboard, which are now included in the ESRI Living Atlas.
Here are some additional maps to track the spread of corvid-19cases around the world.
AstroReality’s EARTH model and app were built with the intent to provide the most relevant, educational information about our planet. As part of that goal, we’ve added data visualizing the impact of the most urgent global issue we face today, the COVID-19 pandemic, helping people understand its spread and impact.
We hope that this can give you a better and more practical understanding of what is happening on a global scale. While emerging infectious disease outbreaks cause significant uncertainty, optimism is essential for mental well-being in a crisis that needs action. The right amount of fear right now is more liable to push us toward necessary action and creative solutions. For example, it might be the best timing to keep learning at home with AstroReality.