COVID-19 Impact Visualizer does this in two ways. Firstly its a front end web tool which gives anyone (including policy makers) an easy to use and understand tool from which to interpret COVID-19 spread better. It allows them to visualise the spread while also seeing how its spread may also be related to the environmental and social factors (i.e. the states' temperature and humidity, the number of flights going in and out of the state, air quality, seasonality, etc.).
The second is that it attempts to consolidate various sources of data from various fields into a single API. This GraphQL API takes COVID-19 tracking data from around the world, historic and current, combines them with environmental data matching the location and time of the COVID-19 cases, and make it possible to read and digest it via an easy to request and read JSON like endpoint. This service is designed to not make this as our sole project, but also any other project that requires this data.
We had a initial idea of a dashboard which combines COVID-19 cases with flight data, in and out of various countries, on a globe like map visualization. We spent the first day researching the topic, various APIs and data sources, and eventually came to the idea of expanding our idea.
We wanted to incorporate the COVID-19 and flight data with other environmental factors like a states temperatures, humidity, air quality, water quality. The idea is that we could capture alot more this way, with better chances of actually showing relationships and providing policy makers with a better tool to make legislation from.
The second day we broke up into teams and built out our idea on two fronts. The first was the frontend visualisation tool. The second was a server side tool which did the actual data collecting, combining and manipulation.
We used React.js, Node, OpenLayers, Bootstrap and the GIBS API in the frontend.
See: https://github.com/lssl4/TheSimulatorsFrontEnd/
We used Apollo Server and Microsoft Azure Function App to create a GraphQL backend server to combine datasources and provide them to the frontend. We used https://www.trackcorona.live/api to pull current COVID-19 data, with the plan to use https://github.com/microsoft/Bing-COVID-19-Data to show historical COVID-19 data.
Sentinel Hub, https://www.meteomatics.com/en/weather-api/, and https://aviationstack.com/product were to be used to pull in environmental and flight data.
The biggest issue on the backend was to get all the data combining from these various sources in the time frame. Technically it became challenging to create the queries in Graphql to combine this data accurately.
See: https://github.com/davidlawson7/simulators-cloud