Every day there are tons of data being generated. The more data we get, however, the more difficult it is to filter and consume reliable and meaningful data that informs us about global issues such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
Our project provides an online web tool to document and showcase relevant mappings and graphs of relevant data surrounding COVID-19 and how they affect the United Nations’ SDG goals. With some of the trends such as job loss, limited access to healthcare, and the fact that such trends disproportionately affects more communities than the others, it’s important to dive deeper into the trends and demographics of the pandemic so that local and national communities can make appropriate decisions with such facts. As a result, the transparency and availability of such data sets and resources are extremely important and should be made widely accessible to everyone.
We started by brainstorming the United Nations’ SDG goals that appear to be most affected by the outbreak of COVID-19, including SDG 6, 7, and 11. We then observed that for SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) specifically, the consequences of the pandemic appears to be the most visible. At the moment, we decided to limit the scale of our project to that of the United States. Some of the indicators we looked at included:
We utilized the geographical data from NASA to map population demographics in hundreds of U.S. cities and cross-analyzed it with other socio-economic data from think tanks and organizations such as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Social Progress Initiative. The ‘product’ was two website iterations to showcase the mappings and graphs, as well as further resources and recommendations. Our tools include but not limited to: Django web developing framework, Flourish data visualization, Mapbox Geomap visualization, Python data visualization tools, Weebly website builder, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, and Excel.
Project website: datadummies.co
Source code: https://github.com/incakoala/COVID-19-Data-Project-Nasa-2020-Spaceapps
NASA resources including Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (sedac), Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Social Progress Initiative.