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A Data Visualization Approach to Mitigating the Impacts of the Global COVID-19 Pandemic
Journal of Public Health in Africa ; 13:69-70, 2022.
Article in English | EMBASE | ID: covidwho-2006793
ABSTRACT
Introduction/

Background:

Since the COVID-19 pandemic engulfed the world, researchers and scientists have explored different techniques to mitigate the impacts of the SARSCoV- 2 virus. Alongside the rollout of COVID vaccines, researchers are implementing predictive algorithms and visualization tools to equip stakeholders with insights on the pandemic and help them make data-driven decisions.

Methods:

In this research, we leveraged publicly available COVID-19 datasets collected by Oxford University's “Our World in Data” team to build an interactive web-based dashboard that monitors the pandemic across all African countries. We studied and analyzed more than 10 existing COVID-19 dashboards to gain insights and create visualizations that most accurately tell the story in the data to both technical and non-technical persons. We built a data quality pipeline to clean, impute and transform inconsistent and anomalous data points in the Our World in Data COVID dataset before rendering it to the dashboard for public use.

Results:

Our work has given individuals and government agencies the capability to monitor the pandemic within a centralized repository. Hitherto, information about COVID-19 in African countries has been in websites whose contextual focus is primarily on advanced countries. With our contribution, stakeholders can view information and interact with the charts related to cases, deaths, tests, vaccinations, and other relevant indicators in a unified web platform that focuses primarily on African countries. Besides the many features supported on the dashboard, the ability to compare the pandemic situation between African countries and regions is particularly informative. Impact We believe that by creating interactive visualizations that leverage open-source datasets, governments and health practitioners can devise mitigative strategies based on the stories told by the data and the visualizations. It is for this purpose that we embarked on this project - to help stakeholders make data-driven decisions and save lives.

Conclusion:

Finally, our analyses have outlined a number of limitations that make the case for better cooperation between academia and governments in accessing protected data, thereby allowing academic partners to build prototypes, tools and products that accompany policy makers in their decision making.
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Collection: Databases of international organizations Database: EMBASE Type of study: Experimental Studies Language: English Journal: Journal of Public Health in Africa Year: 2022 Document Type: Article

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Collection: Databases of international organizations Database: EMBASE Type of study: Experimental Studies Language: English Journal: Journal of Public Health in Africa Year: 2022 Document Type: Article