The UNDP Crisis Bureau coordinates speedy, effective and predictable responses to emergency situations of all kinds, from natural disasters to civil conflict, now including the novel Coronavirus pandemic.
For early warning and response, the Crisis Bureau needed data used to inform UNDP’s assessment of and response to the COVID-19 crisis in support of national partners.
To that end, UNICC’s Data and Analytics Unit worked with the Crisis Bureau to build and deliver in record time a data warehouse solution that sources information from various data sets – two from the World Health Organization (WHO) and one from Johns Hopkins University – displaying it in mapping visualization dashboards.
The COVID-19 data mart provides the number of confirmed cases and deaths and related statistics from the novel Coronavirus globally, nationally, regionally and locally, to visually interpret global and national trends as well as projections, models and forecasts.
WHO reports cases at the country level, while Johns Hopkins University data shows information for various modalities, such as the province level in China, at the city level in the U.S., Australia and Canada and at the country level across the globe.
COVID-19 data is extracted from sources on an hourly basis, reconciling web response restrictions imposed by the different platforms where data sets are hosted.
The information is then loaded to a staging area, transformed and finally extracted in presentation-ready formats into the data warehouse. From there, the UNDP team can easily build their own dashboards with real-time information for analysis and interpretation.
The COVID-19 data warehouse and dashboard capabilities designed and implemented by UNICC’s team will help the Crisis Bureau assess and deliver effective strategies to respond to the ongoing pandemic.
