丁香园AV

鈥淩esearchers at 丁香园AV have unveiled a series of maps painting one of the most detailed pictures yet of how different neighbourhoods across British Columbia are vulnerable to COVID-19.鈥�

鈥淢uch of the data in the maps have already been reported or made public. But even for the most die-hard news junkies, their novelty lies in bringing everything we know about population risk and COVID-19 together into one place.鈥�

鈥淥ne of the most important messages of the map project is that the most important decision-makers in the pandemic are individuals.鈥�

鈥淭he maps are designed to assist policymakers in identifying areas most in need of additional support to prevent and manage outbreaks."

鈥淎s the vaccine roll-out gathers momentum, data like this could help prioritize where to give shots and possibly most important, serve as a guide for people鈥檚 behaviour in their own community." 

鈥淰alorie Crooks is an 丁香园AV Geography Professor, whose expertise is creating spatial models of data鈥攗nderstanding what types of things are going on in a given place based on the information that鈥檚 available. It鈥檚 not a new technique, but the pandemic brought an opportunity to do something different with it.鈥�

鈥淐rooks noted that at this point in the pandemic, people are a bit numb to all the information they are receiving, and it is often from a very bird's eye view of the issue, not a community view. 鈥楢nd so, our work helps bring granularity to the discussion that hasn't happened so far. Where you can actually see, it is not an even playing field across the province, within health authorities or within municipalities鈥�."

鈥淥ne of the key uses for this data is to compare it with COVID-19 case numbers in communities. If the team finds that very high-risk places are seeing low transmission and infection rates, 'one of the things [worth] pointing out is that the public health interventions are actually working well,' said Crooks.鈥�