Article by Andrew Schroeder, Lauren Bateman, John Crowley, Satchit Balsari, Nishant Kishore, Jennifer Chan: “Meanwhile, global digital humanitarians and remote data providers have begun to heed the call to “fight Ebola with information”. Almost immediately following the epidemic declaration, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) coordinated with Médecins Sans Frontières to launch a set of tasks for the global digital mapping community to use high resolution satellite imagery to update building footprints, roads, critical infrastructure, and other features for the creation of maps to aid in population estimations, community surveys, contact tracing, and other epidemic control efforts. Their efforts have been buttressed by releases of satellite imagery from Vantor. Satellogic and Planet have also made satellite imagery available.
Other key organizations have stepped forward as well. Flowminder has been regularly publishing analysis of human mobility flows to and from the epidemic affected areas based on digital device data from the mobile network operator Vodacom. These flow maps allow for rapid prioritization of epidemic control efforts based on anticipation of probable case transmission areas. WorldPop and GRID3 have published high resolution baseline population data as well as accurate health facility locations to aid with planning for health services and calculations of baselines for population exposures, among other essential analyses. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) project is publishing regularly updated geospatially specific conflict data to assist in understanding changing security risks and other threats to affected communities and to the response effort. UN OCHA’s Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) platform is now hosting more than 40 datasets specifically relevant to the current response in DRC, although a reasonably high number of these are topically filtered extracts from OpenStreetMap.
If we look above the proverbial “water line” of the information iceberg at what is publicly visible, easily traceable, and known to be in use by response actors, we can see significant gains in key areas. These include small area demographics, building footprint and infrastructure mapping, remote sensing, event alerting, and case reporting.
Right at the waterline, where novel datasets and models are emerging now into routine visibility and usage, we find human mobility flows based on mobile device data. Flowminder’s data from Vodacom has been integrated into several risk models. At this level we also see a range of disease forecast models and dashboards, at different levels of spatial and temporal resolution, some of which may be based on very similar data and distributed across opaque and discontinuous channels.
What is most concerning though is what still lies below the waterline, where needs may be unmet and substantial gaps in data, information, and analysis likely exist. For instance, as of now there does not appear to be a common list of ebola treatment units available publicly. Data on safe burials is largely absent. Misinformation, as is now normally the case online, runs rampant without an obvious rumor cataloguing effort, or community information management. Logistics and supply chain needs are referenced constantly by response agencies, particularly for PPE and sanitation, but supply chain flows are largely undocumented publicly, and in any event not obviously connected to the epidemiological forecasts and risk assessments despite clear calls from WHO for strategic prepositioning of essential supplies. Health facility locations are widely circulated, but facility-level capacity in terms of staffing, equipment, and supplies, is ambiguous at best. Epidemiological forecasts and risk analyses are not obviously connected to any particular workflows on logistics and supply chain…(More)”.
