Human Factors

The emergence and spread of infectious diseases, like COVID-19, are on the rise. Can you identify patterns between population density and COVID-19 cases and identify factors that could help predict hotspots of disease spread?

Predicting hotspots by using human migration and density data during the pandemic.

Summary

Most people migrate from cities to towns for better income, education food and shelter. This leads to crowding in cities and metropolis which is why we see higher cases in large cities. But as now people are moving out due to various reasons, we are afraid it may lead to greater growth. Also some countries are trying to bring their citizens back from other countries, without proper quarantine, isolation and contract tracing it may be one more reason of concern.

How We Addressed This Challenge

1) We try to see the various situations where there is growth of the pandemic due to a human factor which is migration of citizens and present data to prove it.

OPERATION VANDE BHARAT

In India, the Indian government initiated a massive evacuation program called "Vande Bharat Mission" in May. This involved flights via Air India and its low-cost arm Air India Express, as well as the Indian Navy.

The first phase was a modest 64 flights and a couple of sorties by naval ships that brought back over 16,000 Indians. The ongoing second phase that will last till June 16, plans to bring back another one lakh Indians. So far in phase two, over 45,000 Indians have returned, including about 8,000 migrant workers, 7,656 students and over 5,000 professionals. About 5,000 have returned through land border immigration checkpoints from Nepal and Bangladesh. This has led to influx of people from around the world to India which has led to a growth in cases in states such as Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Karnataka.

A total of 3, 08,200 persons have registered with the missions abroad for repatriation to India on compelling grounds by government sources.

KERALA RATES

Rates of cases in Kerala increased from 17th May due to the arrival of expatriates from around the world. Most of them are from the Gulf and according to a survey, 2536367 people from Kerala are living the Gulf. Requests for repatriation from Kerala were the highest at 60,369

In two weeks since the arrival of the Keralites aboard to Kerala, cases have shot up to 500 cases and 90% of them are imported cases and the rest are immediate contacts.

If we see population density of Kerala it is around 860 persons per km and if only half of the ones living abroad return we can see a high spike of cases in the state.

2) We predict countries where we can see similar trend due to same reasons in the future like Venezuela and Columbia.

VENEZUELA

Like in the case of Venezuela, whose most people have fled the country over the past few years to its nearby countries. At present the max population of Venezuelans is in Colombia followed by Chile, Brazil, Peru, and the US. Now during the pandemic Venezuela is in a much better position compared to Colombia, Chile, Brazil, Peru, and the US which means that the Venezuelans present in this countries may think of going back to their own country and if the government let the huge Venezuelans population in from the countries like the US or Brazil where the COVID-19 virus is spreading like fire and the population density of the capital of Venezuela is 4200 persons per km square, which is indeed very high. All this things will lead to the emergence of Venezuela as a new hotspot or hub of COVID-19 pandemic

How We Developed This Project

We saw the movement of people causing the growth of cases as an live example. Many places in proximity have been affected by the large movement of inter and intra state migrants. So we took various data and predicted the places which can be future hotspots.

We took various data of population density and urban centres from various sited of NASA, ESA,JAXA, CNES and CSA and with help of those we were able determine the future hotspots.


Project Demo
Tags
#COVID-19 #HumanFactors #VIRONEERS
Global Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Global Judging process.