The Use of Data Analytics by Government Played A Big Role During Coronavirus Outbreak

Zhejiang, China Has Launched The First “Power Recovery Index for Enterprises”

With the extensive use of big data, the data analytics and modeling process are used as evidence for forecasting future trends and policy-making. During the current outbreak of coronavirus, one of China’s coastal provinces — Zhejiang, has taken an initiative to use the electricity usage data to view recovery efforts after the coronavirus.

During the period of the high incidence of coronavirus, government sectors are hampered in their efforts to understand local production capacity and arrange for businesses to resume work more efficiently. How to reduce the reporting process, minimize the personnel contact, and avoid duplicate investigation reports has become a major problem for many local governments across China. Things seem much different in Zhejiang province. As a leading province in data capture, openness, and utilization, Zhejiang has launched the first “power recovery index for enterprises.” This index will dynamically monitor differentiate various types of local enterprises and reflect the recovery of current data. By having the comparison of the real-time electricity consumption data collection and historical electricity consumption data of the city’s 43,000 businesses, this index provides two dimensions: the number of business recovered and electrical load monitoring. To this end, the local government, internally, needs to work closely with other sectors across cities and states and its data attributes; as well as, externally, organize civic education on data and bring public support and participation in government data analytics.

Also, it is worth paying attention to the unified collection and deployment of data across cities and departments in Zhejiang province. Unified data management and intergovernmental data analysis greatly improve the utilization efficiency of data and the information integrity of individual research. The unified deployment and collection of data enable the Zhejiang index to be applied in Zhejiang province once tested.