During the COVID-19 lockdown, Vijay Sharma, a techie from Bengaluru has developed a COVID-19 Analytics Dashboard for India called the TheCovidAnalytics. It provides a clean and simple dashboard for people to understand COVID-19 dynamics an also has predictive analytics to predict how the virus is spreading in the country and where it is heading.
Vijay tells us that the dashboard was developed as part of a Corona Hackathon called Coronathon that is being conducted online by a number of digital technology companies with the aim to make innovators, developers come up with ideas to fight the pandemic. "It got really great feedback and a lot of people requested us to launch this in their respective countries. Currently, I am working on launching this In Italy and subsequently in other European countries. An attendee, who saw the demo approached me, and asked if we would create a similar dashboard for Italy," adds Vijay, who works at SAPlabs in Bengaluru.
Explaining how he got around to developing such a dashboard, Vijay says, "It initially took me 3-4 days to develop the entire thing. A lot of trackers are already available giving out the basic numbers but analytics can help us in understanding where it is heading, which areas are more vulnerable. For example, we have census data from which we can determine where the senior citizens' population is more and we can already take precautions. The idea is to move beyond the numbers and determine what insights we can get from it."
There are multiple sources from where Vijay has been procuring the data. "There are multiple Application Programme Interfaces (APIs) that are provided by websites giving out this kind of data. The Health Ministry's data comes out twice a day, then there are special health bulletin boards like the ones put up by the Karnataka Health Department. So, I have got the lists, I check from there and take it. John Hopkins University in the US also gives out data, they give API, so it's easy to gather the data. Then I put in one place, there are automatic jocks or processes that run to clean and organise the data for any kind of formatting error or if there is any kind of discrepancy. It's an automatic process and doesn't take much time," he explains.
This is the link to the dashboard: https://thecovidanalytics.com/
Currently, the Dashboard has the following analytics and visualisations:
• Real-time COVID-19 cases dashboard in India and State level
• State-wise growth patterns and top infected areas
• Comparison of growth trends of top infected states in India
• Top Infected areas at country and state level
• States in India having the highest fatality rate and recovery rate
• Doubling Rate of COVID-19 cases (India and every individual state)
• States with recovery and fatality rates higher than overall India’s recovery and fatality rates
Vijay's future plans include:
• Adding predictive analytics for prediction of growth and direction in detail
• Launching in other countries (Italy Dashboard will be live in the upcoming weekend)
• Working with public administration in cities/states for providing insights into opportunities for control and early detection
• Partnering with healthcare systems for resource and staff allocation prediction
Vijay adds that already his dashboard has been getting about 1200 visits per day and currently, he is working on creating a Twitter account to promote the platform further.
