Covid19 Open Data
As a concerned citizen of the city of Vadodara, Gujarat, India during the pandemic, it was very important for the citizens to know how the city was tackling the covid19 cases over time. As part of my self driven initiative of open-vadodara, I decided to share the information of covid19 information public, accessible and easy to consume.
Why was there a need for this?
1. Covid19 cases were predominantly rising in my home town. It was hard to keep track of the situation, except relying on the media and the state government bulletins and twitter.
2. Available data was not in a user-friendly format to be able to perform search, filter or any kind of analysis on the data
The existing government state bulletin of Gujarat shares the information like shown in the above screenshot. It's pretty hard for a normal person to make sense of the information that is available. Some of the major challenges for existing platforms were:
The existing government state bulletin of Gujarat shares the information like shown in the above screenshot. It's pretty hard for a normal person to make sense of the information that is available. Some of the major challenges for existing platforms were:
Frequency: Initially the frequency of the data being released was unreliable. Had to rely on a few journalist's twitter account who posted on a regular basis
Format: Some resources shared a PDF format of the data being release and some in the form of an image. Later the state government started releasing in a dashboard
Language: Initially the language of published sources were in Gujarati. Became very hard to translate
Structure: Although the structure was not reliable initially, later the data points given were standardised i.e (Confirmed, Deceased, Active and Recovered)
* No vaccination data
* Unable to track historical data
* Hard to make sense of
For vaccination data, one had to rely on the cowin API or the portal.
Who is it really useful for?
The primary intent of having a public portal was to keep the citizens informed about the rise in cases. But soon, it was evident that there were other personas to consider like
Media
The accuracy of the numbers are really important so that the information can be made as transparent and widespread as possible
Front-line worker
As a pathologist, it is important for me to know how many cases are rising in the city so that we can be prepared.
Researcher / Data Enthusiast
This data could be used to model predictions or consult the government agencies to take necessary actions.
Ideas
- Wanted to have a visualised form of the data that allowed a user to view historically
- Show cases wave-wise (if possible) - in a time-series
- The graph had to be a line graph of sorts which clearly indicated the rise, fall or the flatten of the curve. This would visually indicate the situation of the number of cases.
- Important to show the delta (rise & fall) in an overview for the current day
Solution
Open-Vadodara Covid19 is a one page web portal and a one stop solution for all the of challenges mentioned above. It provides data in a consumable and user friendly manner for anyone to consume.
It uses the concept of mapping colours with the information shown in the graph. This acts as a legend as well as an interactive filter using basic contrasting colour palette - which is representative of the meaning of the data.
The platform is open-data and open-source for anyone to consume. The web application is built in a 100% automated way i.e. the data is scheduled to pull every midnight and it automatically updates the data on the website - no human intervention :)
Feel free to contribute & improve the platform. Check it out on github.
Learnings & Impact
- The platform is 100% automated using github pages and github actions
- The data is updated every might night from reliable & verified government sources
- Built the complete application on react & d3. I learned reactjs (this is my first react project)
- Data should be made available and open for public use
- Made it open source for anyone to replicate or contribute
