Smarter Than Covid
By Keagan Stokoe & Zach Wolpe
We are living through a period about which history books will be written, theses will be based, and stories will be told. As we live through this period of history, plenty of uncertainty surrounds us. In an attempt to make data accessible and transparent, Smarter Than Covid was formed to disseminate information to the public. This is how we set out to build tools for major South African policy and decision-makers to handle the Covid19 crisis intelligently.
The Data
The data used to generate these plots was obtained from a host of sources, including various R packages, GitHub repositories, and web scraping scripts written to extract specific data. The link to the code is available at the bottom of this article.
The Interactive Website
Data is powerful, and when a user is afforded the opportunity to interact with the data, they are given a better understanding of it. During a pandemic, it’s vital for ordinary people to understand what’s happening around the world. Built in R and deployed as a Flexdashboard through Shiny, the Smarter Than Covid website allowed for just that.
The image above shows the interactive dashboard, with three separate pages, namely, ‘South Africa’, ‘Country Analysis’ and ‘Global Economy.’
Global Cases
Total cases around the world are displayed, as well as bars indicating the number of recovered cases and the number of deaths.
Interactive World Map
The interactive world map allows users to select a country. Once selected, a selection of information is displayed for the selected country.
Interactive South African Map
This interactive map displays South African provincial boundaries and shades in each area according to the number of cases in the province. Additionally, the provinces can be clicked to generate information about cases, population and population density, which is suspected to be directly related to rate of infection.
Growth in Cases in South Africa
This plot illustrates the growth of South African cases.
Cases per South African Province
A pie chart showing the split of cases in each South African province.
International Data Coverage
With an interactive page, users were able to select the country they wished to view. Upon selection, a variety of information is presented. This includes:
- Deaths per day.
- A summary, indicating total active cases, recovered cases and deaths.
- Effectiveness of response. This graph is a key indicator of whether measures being implemented by the recovery are resulting in fewer cases, fewer deaths and more recoveries.
- Age Distribution. This was particularly relevant as there was a direct correlation between an older population and the number of deaths due to the Coronavirus. For an example of this, see the Italian analysis in the images below.
Global Economy
An analysis of the impact of the Coronavirus on the global economy was also conducted, allowing the user to select markets of interest and see fluctuations in the market over time.
The Mobile App
In an attempt to make the information accessible, we created a mobile app. The problem with attempting to build a mobile app during the Coronavirus Crisis was that any virus related apps were prohibited from app stores. We got creative and developed the app below through Glide Apps. Glide makes it possible to turn Google Sheets spreadsheets into beautiful apps.
The app continuously pulls data from the web, remain up to date with the latest number of active, recovered and fatal cases, on a worldwide and South African scale. Additionally, a map was implemented to display testing centres in South Africa.
Smarter Than Covid Marketing
Our marketing plan was rolled out through a series of images. These images included a call for assistance, which was duly met by willing and able persons, excited to assist during a time when South Africa needed it. Thank you all!
This project was started in the hopes of making a big impact during a time of national crisis. Although the impact we made was not as substantial as we would have liked, the project provided immense value from a technical perspective, as well as learning to work in a team.
Thank you to everybody for their assistance and work along the way, it is always appreciated!
The Code
Link to GitHub: https://github.com/KeaganStokoe/SmarterThanCovid19
