The Challenge
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, there has been a proliferation of websites and portals developed to share resources about the topic, hosted by various public, private, educational, and other institutions. Additionally, virtual libraries have been created as platforms for COVID-19 resources, such as the U.S. National Institutes of Health/National Library of Medicine (see Example Resources section). Other U.S. Federal Government agencies have also developed informative webpages to share resources, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
These platforms present important information about the characteristics of COVID-19 and the global pandemic, and the purpose of each resource may be tailored for a specific audience. However, there is still a lack of virtual platforms and dashboards that integrate research findings about current environmental links to the spread of COVID-19. As data are collected over time and space, they can be analyzed and compared across geographic regions and climatic regimes, including the exploration of the potential impact of environmental factors on the spread of COVID-19.
Your challenge is to find innovative ways to present and analyze integrated, real-time information about the environmental factors affecting the spread of COVID-19. How can you display space-based Earth observation data to help you document and/or understand the distribution of COVID-19 cases and their impacts? How could your solution serve as a useful resource to the Earth science and health science communities in certain regions, or worldwide?
Considerations:
- Is your solution only comprehensible by trained scientists? How easy would it be for policy-makers to interpret the information you provide? What Earth science and health science properties are important for policy makers to understand, and why?
- Can you examine any potential links between human health and the environment?
- How can we develop better surveillance tools to connect COVID-19 cases (raw data at county level) with local/regional environmental factors and determine if significant links exist? How could Earth observations help you design a sampling strategy to quickly identify COVID-19 cases?
- Present your theories and evidence supporting causal (versus correlational) relationships between environmental observations and the pandemic spread.
- Based on integrated data, can you make more reliable predictions about how and where healthcare and financial resources should be allocated?
NASA does not endorse any non-U.S. Government entity and is not responsible for information contained on non-U.S. Government websites.