Using data to fight the COVID-19 pandemic
How do government decisions affect the spread of COVID-19? Understanding this has been a pressing problem for governments across the globe. When is the right time to impose, increase or ease restrictions? How do lockdowns impact infection risk? To what extent do stimulus payments help – or hinder – economic recovery? Governments around the world have been finding answers to these questions in data science.
The problem
As COVID-19 spread, governments around the world implemented various interventions to stem the flow of infections. In Australia, where the pandemic was relatively slow to take hold, the New South Wales Government needed to understand the impact and effectiveness of different interventions in order to design the best possible COVID-19 response strategy.
Publicly available datasets from 188 countries, including information on 1,500 measures used to control the pandemic’s spread, provided an opportunity to explore global COVID-19 trends and responses and map them to the situation in New South Wales. But transforming this data into simple, usable information to support government decision-making was a complex process – one that required a novel data science approach.
The opportunity
Researchers at the UTS Data Science Institute, supported by policy input from the University of Sydney and design input from the UTS Animal Logic Academy, developed a series of interactive data visualisation dashboards that surfaced key relationships between government measures and disease trends within a country. The dashboards were made publicly available via the NSW Data Analytics Centre portal.
These dashboards can compare COVID-19 infection rates and interventions taken by other countries to the situation in NSW, demonstrating where the state is leading or lagging in terms of response. They also provide important insights into how these interventions, such as lockdowns, varying restrictions and stimulus packages, can be better deployed and enforced in practice. These dashboards provide an important evidence base to build public confidence in Australia’s pandemic response.
The impact
The work provides significant insights to both state and federal governments who are seeking to understand optimal control measures in responding to a global pandemic. In collaboration with Deloitte and the Chief Data Scientist of NSW, these dashboards are now in use to support NSW Treasury reporting and have been featured in NSW Premier, Cabinet and National Cabinet briefings.
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