One of the encouraging aspects emerging from the response to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic is the groundswell of collaboration and data sharing across nations, organizations and sectors. Groups that have never done business together are forming relationships and cooperating to solve one of the most pervasive threats to economic development in decades.
Drawing from lessons learned during the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome pandemic, public health agencies have recognized the importance of sharing data in real time and easy-to-interpret formats during an outbreak. Decision makers need accurate, real-time data to make evidence-based decisions, and the public needs to be aware of the scale of disease transmission. Frequent reporting can put an unnecessary burden on public health agencies; thus, an automatically updating dashboard is a great solution to fill data needs. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a proliferation of online platforms and dashboards. We've identified a few below and provided a brief description of their relative advantages.
Despite these capabilities, as users of these platforms at the Asian Development Bank (ADB), we identified two main gaps, namely that: (1) the dashboards, in isolation, are fit for purpose and do not allow for customization or exploration and (2) dashboards are limited to a single aspect of the pandemic (e.g., epidemiology, an organization’s footprint, or country-wide responses). These limitations hamper ADB program officers, researchers and decision-makers, who require flexible, comprehensive and up-to-date information on the COVID-19 pandemic.
We sought to fill these gaps and create an all-in-one resource for users to understand the impact of COVID-19 by leveraging technology from the private sector. Founded in 2014, the Global Health Security Agenda’s Private Sector Roundtable (PSRT) mobilizes industry leaders to help countries prevent, detect and respond to health-related crises and strengthen systems for health security. Qlik – a company which provides an end-to-end, real-time data integration and analytics cloud platform to close the gaps between data, insights and action – and Qlik.org, the company’s corporate responsibility arm, have been previously supporting pandemic preparedness through the PSRT by developing applications to visualize and monitor progress on health security capacities. At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, ADB and Qlik began collaborating on a solution to address the lack of a comprehensive COVID-19 data dashboard.
By combining multiple resources and organizations’ data sets, ADB and Qlik have partnered to create a one-stop shop application for users to explore the impact of COVID-19 in terms of country pandemic preparedness and response capacities, epidemiology, government responses and economic losses. In detail, the platform contains information on:
Together, this platform is powerful enough to answer a range of questions. For project preparation, it can be used to identify country needs based on case count and projected economic loss, helping organizations prioritize areas for investment or response based on JEE scores or pandemic stage. Researchers can also identify the impact of various government measures on the spread of disease within a country.
“Working with ADB on developing this app has enabled Qlik to deploy the best of our capabilities to help combat one of the most dangerous, ongoing global threats,” said Julie Kae, Executive Director of Qlik.org. “We can only overcome this challenge if we have data steering us toward effective, targeted solutions.”
The platform will continue to be updated based on feedback and availability of data to make it as useful as possible. Potential additions include incorporating ADB COVID-19 response project information, integrating subnational data where available, and expanding the tool to provide information on vaccine development and deployment.
In a climate where conflicting, incomplete, or erroneous information are vying for space within our public and health policy discourses, there is a need for a single source of truth. Data needs to be accessible to inform COVID-19 containment and recovery policy. Making relevant data available in real time is the first important step toward driving the data-driven decision making which is at the center of this conversation. The more that this data can be considered, analyzed and translated into action, the better our response to COVID-19 can be and more knowledgeable our conversation about our response can be.
Please take a look at our COVID-19 app, developed jointly with Qlik, by checking out this link.