Using FOSS4G to track the COVID-19 evolution in Romania
Vrinceanu, Cristina
In this talk, we aim to present the geo-spatial community efforts of visualizing the geospatial spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in Romania since its beginning in March 2020 until the present time. Geo-spatial.org’s Covid-19 app, built entirely on FOSS, delivers correct, complete and updated official information on the virus spread in Romania. Our platform contains several maps and graphs depicting the different dimensions of the pandemic in Romania, ranging from confirmed cases/deaths/healed patients and related statistics, to hospital infrastructure, quarantine zones to pollution/mobility indexes, as well as other impact indicators of this epidemic in our country. Unfortunately, the Romanian authorities have failed in communicating the evolution of the COVID-19, resulting in numerous glitches in different reports. Thus, we have been volunteering our time to collect detailed information from the local/national media, compare it to the official reporting, sort it and deliver it in a structured manner. One year in the pandemic and the situation has not improved. With a notable, but a too limited exception, the Romanian authorities have not changed their opaque policy of interacting with the community. Thus, the COVID-19 geo-spatial.org team has continued to support the data mapping efforts and the open data community. The application is built using Node.js, PostgreSQL+PostGIS, R on the backend and OpenLayers, Angular, charts.js, Plotly and D3.js for the frontend. The source code is on GitHub, MIT licensed. The infrastructure is supported by Sage Group on AWS and by Carto.
 Hello everybody and welcome back in Barilo. Our next speaker is Cristina Vincerno. She's a postgraduate researcher with the University of Nottingham, where she works with the remote sensing. But today she's going to speak on behalf of Geospatial.org, which is the Romanian chapter of OZGEO. Her topic is community mapping of the COVID-19 pandemic in Romania using phosphoG. But unfortunately due to scheduling conflict, in fact she's chairing another session in a parallel. She will not be able to present this live. So I have a pre-recorded audio that I will play for you on this topic. Hello everybody, my name is Cristina. I'm a PhD student with the University of Nottingham. And I'm talking today on behalf of Geospatial.org and volunteers. And our presentation is going to be about how we use phosphoG to track the COVID-19 evolution in Romania. So first of all, I would like to introduce our team. We are 32 people in this team that created the platform, the COVID-19 platform. Some of us are volunteers from the Geospatial.org organization, which is an OZGEO chapter. Some of us are just volunteers that wanted to help during the initial stages of the pandemic. And everybody came together after the call that we had in March 2020 when we started the platform. We knew kind of, it was very obvious with the situation that was happening back then that we're going to have a pandemic situation. So we're going to go into a lockdown based on where you can see in Italy or the rest of Europe. So a lot of us wanted to help somehow. And since we didn't know exactly how to do it, because we were not medical experts, we came together to help with the skills that we knew we have. And those are mapping and with additional skills. Some of us contributed to communicating, some of us contributed to just collecting the data, creating graphs, technical skills, setting up the platform and the technical background, or just advising with different information about health and so on. So it's just the 32 of us. Some of us are still doing it. Some are contributing less or have departed, but it's been a very collective effort. And to give you some insight of what this effort means and why we started everything and how we navigated all this period, I'm going to give you a quick trip through a timeline of this COVID-19 pandemic in Romania. So the most important steps that we encountered. The first one is when we had the announcement of the first Romanian COVID-19 case. That happened on the 26th of February 2020. It was already after Italy was in a very bad state. So that was our first case. We were expecting it. And we knew at that point that it's going to come to Romania as well. And we would have to take some, we will go into restrictions, we will go into a certain state of emergency alert and so on. So that is actually what prompted us to think about contributing. And as I said, we are not medical advisors. We're not medical trained. So our training is in mapping. So we started to put together this idea of creating a mapping platform also because we were looking at what was happening worldwide, all the platforms that popped mapping the cases and so on. We were looking at platforms that were completely open and platforms that were not showing a lot of data, governments that had different approach and so on. And we were also thinking of what will be the approach for Romanian authorities. Up to this point, we could actually locate every single case with a lot of detail. We knew the names of the people, we knew who they got in contact with. And we could actually do this very nice graph of relationships between the different cases. But obviously that was not the situation that it lost a lot once the cases were increasing. And indeed the cases did increase and that prompted the WHO general director to declare COVID-19 a global pandemic. And that also prompted the Romanian authorities to declare a state of emergency once the number of cases grew uncontrollably. That was on the 17th of March 2020 for Romania. And it was not only a state of emergency and a lockdown, a national lockdown, but it was also a military imposed lockdown. And that was very important because if up to now we could learn about the cases, we could learn details about their names, we could learn details about where they were about. Obviously these cases started from all these little details to be less detailed. Let's say we knew that there was a case, we knew the gender of the person, we knew the age and so on. At some point we knew that they were institutionalized, they were in a hospital and then they were moved in another place. And that was already a little bit blurry. Well, we went into the state of emergency and on the 19th of March 2020 we went into local secrecy. What local secrecy means is that all these detailed data that we had up to that point, that we were collecting either from media or from local authorities, so local health authorities, local administration and so on, which was at the county level, we could not do this anymore. So the military administration said stop and we would go at the national level and we would only receive once per day a summary report in which we're getting only one number at national level, one number for the number of deaths, one number of cases, number of recover. We created a huge gap because we couldn't map it anymore, we couldn't have this detail at county level. And besides that, we couldn't locate the cases, we couldn't do that relationship graph anymore. We couldn't follow what was happening to the cases. We didn't know if these were cases, fresh cases from the day before. There were cases that got reported one week ago and they're basically delayed up to now. And for some of this data, we couldn't find it anymore and we still can't find it. So even up to now we don't know where those people vanished. And besides that, we were forced to put together all these mechanisms to find this data. So we went into looking into a lot of data sources, what we could find from local authorities, what we could find from the media. We had a tool that helped us to scar the media and so on, but that was a lot of manual labor. It was really helpful, the fact that Romania and GDPR has a very strange relationship. So sometimes you would get some information in the media that you would not get otherwise, but anyhow it created a huge gap in the data set. We got back to details on the 2nd of April. It didn't last too long, the secrecy, but we still got truncated details. Obviously they didn't return to the same level of information as before. And furthermore, all the information that was delivered was extremely unconstructed. So besides the fact that we could not find all the information, it was incredibly unstructured. Coming from different authorities in different formats. Sometimes they were just written notes and sometimes it's just PDF or Verian Structured Excel and so on. So that posed further issues. On the 15th of May, finally the lockdown ended. The national lockdown ended. Romania kept a state of alert, which is still ongoing. And from that point onwards, a string of chaotic measures or measures that you could find everywhere else in the world started. So basically we had these times in which we got either schools opening, closing, restaurants opening, closing and so on. And the most notable moment was the electoral moment in which we had to go to voting. And that was very interesting from the point of view of the authorities because they relaxed the measures right before and the restrictions got back afterwards. But you could definitely see a rise in the number of cases. We got to another milestone this year in March when, actually in February when they published the first data set of open data. Which came from the authorities directly. So if up to then, that moment, we had some platforms that were getting some data from the authorities. We never got open data from the authorities and you've seen all these secrecy and so on. 15th of February was a milestone because we got this first date of the open data and we actually got to discuss about it a few days later in March at the Open Data Day. Because this data set was not perfect. It was full of unstructured data, let's say. It had a lot of shortcomings and the citizen initiatives that were mapping the pandemic. The NGOs that were involved in this got together with the government at this first discussion about open data and about this data set specifically. And we expressed our additional needs, what we would like to have in this data set and how it should minimally look like for us to use it in a very streamlined way. This got very political very quickly and it didn't last long. And the health minister, the one that initiated all this open data publishing, got dismissed. And that came with the fact that for a while the data set was not updated anymore. So even the short glimpse that we had into what data the government has disappeared quickly. Coming back to our platform, I want to reiterate that this is a collective effort. It's community volunteering. We have 32 people that brought into this a lot of skills, diverse skills. And it's not only us mapping NGO, just special NGO, but it's also people that had no just special knowledge or no training, but got together with us and we're collaborating on producing this platform and this data. As I said, we're looking at multiple data sources. We looked at local authorities. We looked at national authorities. We have this communicate that we're with this report that we get from the authorities, but we also look at different other data that we could use to get something more in sight. So because of the nature of this data sets, the fact that they're being spread among different sources, they also come in different formats and so on. So sometimes it's a lot of unfiltered data and unstructured data. And we have to do all the manual or automatic where it's possible, filtering. Sometimes, for example, in reports you had this PDF that was unable to, we were unable to perform any character recognition. So we could extract the data automatically. So we had to do it manually and so on. And because of all these struggles and all this secrecy from the government, we issued this open data manifest, which I put here in the presentation. And this open data manifest is basically what we intended to be an outcry from the citizen initiatives towards the government. And it had some echoes as you've seen, they did something in the end, but it's not perfect. We do this collection of data every single day since last year in March, we've been collecting data daily. Daily is covering the media, not collecting data and daily trying to make it usable and put it into, to curate it in a way that it can be used by other people. We try to constantly update and improve our platform. That means that it's not only about the data that we have and the way that it is structured and the way that we curate it and the way that we look for additional information, but it's also the way that the platform integrates all this information. We use open source technologies to build our platform on and a variety of useful products that go into there from different technologies to different data sets that are additional to the health information that we get. And all our data is freely distributed, it's open access. We share it with the community, we share it with whoever wants to use it. And we also collaborate with some other initiatives to support them and they support us. Our platform is based on open source technologies that we have a backend that is no GS, PostgreSQL and PostGIS. We also have in the backend we collect the data for Google spreadsheets and all the posting for our platform is supported generously by the Sage group from the West University of Venezuela and that goes through Mozambique web services. The front end however is on multiple technologies because we had multiple skills. So some of us are more familiar with R in Chinese, some of us are more familiar with open layers, Angular, so basically JavaScript, or Python and closely and so on. And we also have some of the maps that are based on Google App Engine with subsequent data sets and Carto which generously supported us through their coronavirus program. As I said, all data is open for access, we distribute it through CSDs and whoever wants to integrate it has also dedicated API to do so for each data set. All the data that we have inside, so we have health data that we collect from authorities, that includes active cases, new cases, testing, death recoveries, vaccines and so on. We also have data that we collect from press releases or from the news, from the media itself, so we had that tool that was developed by Casa Journalist Rui which translates to Journalist House. It's an independent journalism outlet. And they helped us with this tool that helps us to look through a lot of newsletters and Carto media for additional information. We collaborate with Dragovanan from drafts.raw to calculate the R-Rite. He's a statistician. Sorry. We also have the health infrastructure, marginalized communities and their access to health infrastructure and some European context to date. Other data that we include is European mobility to understand the mobility patterns, points of interest. Other mobility data that is national from Apple, Google and Waze, air quality that we correlate with Sentinel-5P from the COMPARANICUS program and AIRLIVE which are ground-based sensors. We looked at voting and elections data, public interest in the COVID-19, sea water temperature for the summertime and basically all the indicators for impact, which is agricultural tourism, demographics, real estate, automotive industry, economy, communication and media so we could actively monitor how COVID is impacting all these sectors during the pandemic in Romania. So we could see through the data when we had different restrictions, what kind of impact they had or when we had an increased number of cases, what kind of impact they had. We got some media support as well. We got into some national news outlets and also sometimes they just reported using our platforms, sometimes they embedded and they collaborated with us. We got also in the international aggregators, news aggregators and so on, some support from Twitter community and we even got into research. So there are research articles that use our platform to get some insights and help their research. I'm just going to quickly get you through a demo so we could see our platform. So this is the dashboard when you enter. We have the number of confirmed cases, active cases, the new cases in the last 24 hours, whoever has been recovered, deaths, county level, locality level, so basically very granular data about number of cases, county level cases and quarantine areas. All this is summarized in these graphs here. We also have an English version that is not complete though. We have some maps on different thematic. So this is health infrastructure, we have a voting presence, European context, these are supported by the corridor. We have this map of a new two concentrations. And we also have vaccination map and a new statistics related to health indicators to help variables and also environment, public interest and so on. These are all very unstructured just because they come from different people, everybody contributed in a certain way, but we are working to make structure. And finally, we have this impact graphs that we call it the odd right now that measure the impact of COVID-19 over the Romanian society in general. So different indicators from county communications, populations and so on. Just to come to conclude, I'm very thankful that you follow this presentation. If you have additional questions, we are very open to answer them. We've got the contact here. And basically, we're looking forward to hear your thoughts about what we're doing if you have any suggestions for improvements and so on. I just want to thank again all my colleagues for doing this work for the last year and to really appreciate that we got some good appraisal from the public for this platform. Thank you very much. I hope you have a great post for you. Okay, really a pity that we don't have the opportunity to ask questions about this interesting presentation that was actually the last during this afternoon session. And for those of you who are still feeling we're continuing phospho G even today, there is the social gathering. So encourage everybody to show up there. Okay, have a continued nice day.
 Hello everybody and welcome back in Barilo.  Our next speaker is Cristina Vincerno.  She's a postgraduate researcher with the University of Nottingham,  where she works with the remote sensing.  But today she's going to speak on behalf of Geospatial.org,  which is the Romanian chapter of OZGEO.  Her topic is community mapping of  the COVID-19 pandemic in Romania using phosphoG.  But unfortunately due to scheduling conflict,  in fact she's chairing another session in a parallel.  She will not be able to present this live.  So I have a pre-recorded audio that I will play for you on this topic.  Hello everybody, my name is Cristina. I'm a PhD student with the University of Nottingham.  And I'm talking today on behalf of Geospatial.org and volunteers.  And our presentation is going to be about how we use phosphoG to track the COVID-19 evolution in Romania.  So first of all, I would like to introduce our team.  We are 32 people in this team that created the platform, the COVID-19 platform.  Some of us are volunteers from the Geospatial.org organization, which is an OZGEO chapter.  Some of us are just volunteers that wanted to help during the initial stages of the pandemic.  And everybody came together after the call that we had in March 2020 when we started the platform.  We knew kind of, it was very obvious with the situation that was happening back then that we're going to have a pandemic situation.  So we're going to go into a lockdown based on where you can see in Italy or the rest of Europe.  So a lot of us wanted to help somehow.  And since we didn't know exactly how to do it, because we were not medical experts, we came together to help with the skills that we knew we have.  And those are mapping and with additional skills.  Some of us contributed to communicating, some of us contributed to just collecting the data, creating graphs, technical skills, setting up the platform and the technical background,  or just advising with different information about health and so on.  So it's just the 32 of us.  Some of us are still doing it.  Some are contributing less or have departed, but it's been a very collective effort.  And to give you some insight of what this effort means and why we started everything and how we navigated all this period,  I'm going to give you a quick trip through a timeline of this COVID-19 pandemic in Romania.  So the most important steps that we encountered.  The first one is when we had the announcement of the first Romanian COVID-19 case.  That happened on the 26th of February 2020. It was already after Italy was in a very bad state.  So that was our first case. We were expecting it.  And we knew at that point that it's going to come to Romania as well.  And we would have to take some, we will go into restrictions, we will go into a certain state of emergency alert and so on.  So that is actually what prompted us to think about contributing.  And as I said, we are not medical advisors. We're not medical trained.  So our training is in mapping.  So we started to put together this idea of creating a mapping platform also because we were looking at what was happening worldwide,  all the platforms that popped mapping the cases and so on.  We were looking at platforms that were completely open and platforms that were not showing a lot of data,  governments that had different approach and so on.  And we were also thinking of what will be the approach for Romanian authorities.  Up to this point, we could actually locate every single case with a lot of detail.  We knew the names of the people, we knew who they got in contact with.  And we could actually do this very nice graph of relationships between the different cases.  But obviously that was not the situation that it lost a lot once the cases were increasing.  And indeed the cases did increase and that prompted the WHO general director to declare COVID-19 a global pandemic.  And that also prompted the Romanian authorities to declare a state of emergency once the number of cases grew uncontrollably.  That was on the 17th of March 2020 for Romania.  And it was not only a state of emergency and a lockdown, a national lockdown, but it was also a military imposed lockdown.  And that was very important because if up to now we could learn about the cases, we could learn details about their names,  we could learn details about where they were about.  Obviously these cases started from all these little details to be less detailed.  Let's say we knew that there was a case, we knew the gender of the person, we knew the age and so on.  At some point we knew that they were institutionalized, they were in a hospital and then they were moved in another place.  And that was already a little bit blurry.  Well, we went into the state of emergency and on the 19th of March 2020 we went into local secrecy.  What local secrecy means is that all these detailed data that we had up to that point,  that we were collecting either from media or from local authorities, so local health authorities, local administration and so on,  which was at the county level, we could not do this anymore.  So the military administration said stop and we would go at the national level and we would only receive once per day a summary report  in which we're getting only one number at national level, one number for the number of deaths, one number of cases, number of recover.  We created a huge gap because we couldn't map it anymore, we couldn't have this detail at county level.  And besides that, we couldn't locate the cases, we couldn't do that relationship graph anymore.  We couldn't follow what was happening to the cases.  We didn't know if these were cases, fresh cases from the day before.  There were cases that got reported one week ago and they're basically delayed up to now.  And for some of this data, we couldn't find it anymore and we still can't find it.  So even up to now we don't know where those people vanished.  And besides that, we were forced to put together all these mechanisms to find this data.  So we went into looking into a lot of data sources, what we could find from local authorities, what we could find from the media.  We had a tool that helped us to scar the media and so on, but that was a lot of manual labor.  It was really helpful, the fact that Romania and GDPR has a very strange relationship.  So sometimes you would get some information in the media that you would not get otherwise,  but anyhow it created a huge gap in the data set.  We got back to details on the 2nd of April.  It didn't last too long, the secrecy, but we still got truncated details.  Obviously they didn't return to the same level of information as before.  And furthermore, all the information that was delivered was extremely unconstructed.  So besides the fact that we could not find all the information, it was incredibly unstructured.  Coming from different authorities in different formats.  Sometimes they were just written notes and sometimes it's just PDF or Verian Structured Excel and so on.  So that posed further issues.  On the 15th of May, finally the lockdown ended.  The national lockdown ended.  Romania kept a state of alert, which is still ongoing.  And from that point onwards, a string of chaotic measures or measures that you could find everywhere else in the world started.  So basically we had these times in which we got either schools opening, closing, restaurants opening, closing and so on.  And the most notable moment was the electoral moment in which we had to go to voting.  And that was very interesting from the point of view of the authorities because they relaxed the measures right before and the restrictions got back afterwards.  But you could definitely see a rise in the number of cases.  We got to another milestone this year in March when, actually in February when they published the first data set of open data.  Which came from the authorities directly.  So if up to then, that moment, we had some platforms that were getting some data from the authorities.  We never got open data from the authorities and you've seen all these secrecy and so on.  15th of February was a milestone because we got this first date of the open data and we actually got to discuss about it a few days later in March at the Open Data Day.  Because this data set was not perfect.  It was full of unstructured data, let's say.  It had a lot of shortcomings and the citizen initiatives that were mapping the pandemic.  The NGOs that were involved in this got together with the government at this first discussion about open data and about this data set specifically.  And we expressed our additional needs, what we would like to have in this data set and how it should minimally look like for us to use it in a very streamlined way.  This got very political very quickly and it didn't last long.  And the health minister, the one that initiated all this open data publishing, got dismissed.  And that came with the fact that for a while the data set was not updated anymore.  So even the short glimpse that we had into what data the government has disappeared quickly.  Coming back to our platform, I want to reiterate that this is a collective effort.  It's community volunteering.  We have 32 people that brought into this a lot of skills, diverse skills.  And it's not only us mapping NGO, just special NGO, but it's also people that had no just special knowledge or no training, but got together with us and we're collaborating on producing this platform and this data.  As I said, we're looking at multiple data sources.  We looked at local authorities.  We looked at national authorities.  We have this communicate that we're with this report that we get from the authorities, but we also look at different other data that we could use to get something more in sight.  So because of the nature of this data sets, the fact that they're being spread among different sources, they also come in different formats and so on.  So sometimes it's a lot of unfiltered data and unstructured data.  And we have to do all the manual or automatic where it's possible, filtering.  Sometimes, for example, in reports you had this PDF that was unable to, we were unable to perform any character recognition.  So we could extract the data automatically.  So we had to do it manually and so on.  And because of all these struggles and all this secrecy from the government, we issued this open data manifest, which I put here in the presentation.  And this open data manifest is basically what we intended to be an outcry from the citizen initiatives towards the government.  And it had some echoes as you've seen, they did something in the end, but it's not perfect.  We do this collection of data every single day since last year in March, we've been collecting data daily.  Daily is covering the media, not collecting data and daily trying to make it usable and put it into, to curate it in a way that it can be used by other people.  We try to constantly update and improve our platform.  That means that it's not only about the data that we have and the way that it is structured and the way that we curate it and the way that we look for additional information, but it's also the way that the platform integrates all this information.  We use open source technologies to build our platform on and a variety of useful products that go into there from different technologies to different data sets that are additional to the health information that we get.  And all our data is freely distributed, it's open access. We share it with the community, we share it with whoever wants to use it.  And we also collaborate with some other initiatives to support them and they support us.  Our platform is based on open source technologies that we have a backend that is no GS, PostgreSQL and PostGIS.  We also have in the backend we collect the data for Google spreadsheets and all the posting for our platform is supported generously by the Sage group from the West University of Venezuela and that goes through Mozambique web services.  The front end however is on multiple technologies because we had multiple skills. So some of us are more familiar with R in Chinese, some of us are more familiar with open layers, Angular, so basically JavaScript, or Python and closely and so on.  And we also have some of the maps that are based on Google App Engine with subsequent data sets and Carto which generously supported us through their coronavirus program.  As I said, all data is open for access, we distribute it through CSDs and whoever wants to integrate it has also dedicated API to do so for each data set.  All the data that we have inside, so we have health data that we collect from authorities, that includes active cases, new cases, testing, death recoveries, vaccines and so on.  We also have data that we collect from press releases or from the news, from the media itself, so we had that tool that was developed by Casa Journalist Rui which translates to Journalist House. It's an independent journalism outlet.  And they helped us with this tool that helps us to look through a lot of newsletters and Carto media for additional information.  We collaborate with Dragovanan from drafts.raw to calculate the R-Rite. He's a statistician.  Sorry. We also have the health infrastructure, marginalized communities and their access to health infrastructure and some European context to date.  Other data that we include is European mobility to understand the mobility patterns, points of interest.  Other mobility data that is national from Apple, Google and Waze, air quality that we correlate with Sentinel-5P from the COMPARANICUS program and AIRLIVE which are ground-based sensors.  We looked at voting and elections data, public interest in the COVID-19, sea water temperature for the summertime and basically all the indicators for impact, which is agricultural tourism, demographics, real estate, automotive industry,  economy, communication and media so we could actively monitor how COVID is impacting all these sectors during the pandemic in Romania.  So we could see through the data when we had different restrictions, what kind of impact they had or when we had an increased number of cases, what kind of impact they had.  We got some media support as well. We got into some national news outlets and also sometimes they just reported using our platforms, sometimes they embedded and they collaborated with us.  We got also in the international aggregators, news aggregators and so on, some support from Twitter community and we even got into research.  So there are research articles that use our platform to get some insights and help their research.  I'm just going to quickly get you through a demo so we could see our platform.  So this is the dashboard when you enter. We have the number of confirmed cases, active cases, the new cases in the last 24 hours, whoever has been recovered, deaths,  county level, locality level, so basically very granular data about number of cases, county level cases and quarantine areas.  All this is summarized in these graphs here.  We also have an English version that is not complete though.  We have some maps on different thematic. So this is health infrastructure, we have a voting presence, European context, these are supported by the corridor.  We have this map of a new two concentrations.  And we also have vaccination map and a new statistics related to health indicators to help variables and also environment, public interest and so on.  These are all very unstructured just because they come from different people, everybody contributed in a certain way, but we are working to make structure.  And finally, we have this impact graphs that we call it the odd right now that measure the impact of COVID-19 over the Romanian society in general.  So different indicators from county communications, populations and so on.  Just to come to conclude, I'm very thankful that you follow this presentation.  If you have additional questions, we are very open to answer them. We've got the contact here.  And basically, we're looking forward to hear your thoughts about what we're doing if you have any suggestions for improvements and so on.  I just want to thank again all my colleagues for doing this work for the last year and to really appreciate that we got some good appraisal from the public for this platform.  Thank you very much. I hope you have a great post for you.  Okay, really a pity that we don't have the opportunity to ask questions about this interesting presentation that was actually the last during this afternoon session.  And for those of you who are still feeling we're continuing phospho G even today, there is the social gathering.  So encourage everybody to show up there.  Okay, have a continued nice day.
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Hello everybody and welcome back in Barilo. Our next speaker is Cristina Vincerno. She's a postgraduate researcher with the University of Nottingham, where she works with the remote sensing. But today she's going to speak on behalf of Geospatial.org, which is the Romanian chapter of OZGEO. Her topic is community mapping of the COVID-19 pandemic in Romania using phosphoG. But unfortunately due to scheduling conflict, in fact she's chairing another session in a parallel. She will not be able to present this live. So I have a pre-recorded audio that I will play for you on this topic. Hello everybody, my name is Cristina. I'm a PhD student with the University of Nottingham. And I'm talking today on behalf of Geospatial.org and volunteers. And our presentation is going to be about how we use phosphoG to track the COVID-19 evolution in Romania. So first of all, I would like to introduce our team. We are 32 people in this team that created the platform, the COVID-19 platform. Some of us are volunteers from the Geospatial.org organization, which is an OZGEO chapter. Some of us are just volunteers that wanted to help during the initial stages of the pandemic. And everybody came together after the call that we had in March 2020 when we started the platform. We knew kind of, it was very obvious with the situation that was happening back then that we're going to have a pandemic situation. So we're going to go into a lockdown based on where you can see in Italy or the rest of Europe. So a lot of us wanted to help somehow. And since we didn't know exactly how to do it, because we were not medical experts, we came together to help with the skills that we knew we have. And those are mapping and with additional skills. Some of us contributed to communicating, some of us contributed to just collecting the data, creating graphs, technical skills, setting up the platform and the technical background, or just advising with different information about health and so on. So it's just the 32 of us. Some of us are still doing it. Some are contributing less or have departed, but it's been a very collective effort. And to give you some insight of what this effort means and why we started everything and how we navigated all this period, I'm going to give you a quick trip through a timeline of this COVID-19 pandemic in Romania. So the most important steps that we encountered. The first one is when we had the announcement of the first Romanian COVID-19 case. That happened on the 26th of February 2020. It was already after Italy was in a very bad state. So that was our first case. We were expecting it. And we knew at that point that it's going to come to Romania as well. And we would have to take some, we will go into restrictions, we will go into a certain state of emergency alert and so on. So that is actually what prompted us to think about contributing. And as I said, we are not medical advisors. We're not medical trained. So our training is in mapping. So we started to put together this idea of creating a mapping platform also because we were looking at what was happening worldwide, all the platforms that popped mapping the cases and so on. We were looking at platforms that were completely open and platforms that were not showing a lot of data, governments that had different approach and so on. And we were also thinking of what will be the approach for Romanian authorities. Up to this point, we could actually locate every single case with a lot of detail. We knew the names of the people, we knew who they got in contact with. And we could actually do this very nice graph of relationships between the different cases. But obviously that was not the situation that it lost a lot once the cases were increasing. And indeed the cases did increase and that prompted the WHO general director to declare COVID-19 a global pandemic. And that also prompted the Romanian authorities to declare a state of emergency once the number of cases grew uncontrollably. That was on the 17th of March 2020 for Romania. And it was not only a state of emergency and a lockdown, a national lockdown, but it was also a military imposed lockdown. And that was very important because if up to now we could learn about the cases, we could learn details about their names, we could learn details about where they were about. Obviously these cases started from all these little details to be less detailed. Let's say we knew that there was a case, we knew the gender of the person, we knew the age and so on. At some point we knew that they were institutionalized, they were in a hospital and then they were moved in another place. And that was already a little bit blurry. Well, we went into the state of emergency and on the 19th of March 2020 we went into local secrecy. What local secrecy means is that all these detailed data that we had up to that point, that we were collecting either from media or from local authorities, so local health authorities, local administration and so on, which was at the county level, we could not do this anymore. So the military administration said stop and we would go at the national level and we would only receive once per day a summary report in which we're getting only one number at national level, one number for the number of deaths, one number of cases, number of recover. We created a huge gap because we couldn't map it anymore, we couldn't have this detail at county level. And besides that, we couldn't locate the cases, we couldn't do that relationship graph anymore. We couldn't follow what was happening to the cases. We didn't know if these were cases, fresh cases from the day before. There were cases that got reported one week ago and they're basically delayed up to now. And for some of this data, we couldn't find it anymore and we still can't find it. So even up to now we don't know where those people vanished. And besides that, we were forced to put together all these mechanisms to find this data. So we went into looking into a lot of data sources, what we could find from local authorities, what we could find from the media. We had a tool that helped us to scar the media and so on, but that was a lot of manual labor. It was really helpful, the fact that Romania and GDPR has a very strange relationship. So sometimes you would get some information in the media that you would not get otherwise, but anyhow it created a huge gap in the data set. We got back to details on the 2nd of April. It didn't last too long, the secrecy, but we still got truncated details. Obviously they didn't return to the same level of information as before. And furthermore, all the information that was delivered was extremely unconstructed. So besides the fact that we could not find all the information, it was incredibly unstructured. Coming from different authorities in different formats. Sometimes they were just written notes and sometimes it's just PDF or Verian Structured Excel and so on. So that posed further issues. On the 15th of May, finally the lockdown ended. The national lockdown ended. Romania kept a state of alert, which is still ongoing. And from that point onwards, a string of chaotic measures or measures that you could find everywhere else in the world started. So basically we had these times in which we got either schools opening, closing, restaurants opening, closing and so on. And the most notable moment was the electoral moment in which we had to go to voting. And that was very interesting from the point of view of the authorities because they relaxed the measures right before and the restrictions got back afterwards. But you could definitely see a rise in the number of cases. We got to another milestone this year in March when, actually in February when they published the first data set of open data. Which came from the authorities directly. So if up to then, that moment, we had some platforms that were getting some data from the authorities. We never got open data from the authorities and you've seen all these secrecy and so on. 15th of February was a milestone because we got this first date of the open data and we actually got to discuss about it a few days later in March at the Open Data Day. Because this data set was not perfect. It was full of unstructured data, let's say. It had a lot of shortcomings and the citizen initiatives that were mapping the pandemic. The NGOs that were involved in this got together with the government at this first discussion about open data and about this data set specifically. And we expressed our additional needs, what we would like to have in this data set and how it should minimally look like for us to use it in a very streamlined way. This got very political very quickly and it didn't last long. And the health minister, the one that initiated all this open data publishing, got dismissed. And that came with the fact that for a while the data set was not updated anymore. So even the short glimpse that we had into what data the government has disappeared quickly. Coming back to our platform, I want to reiterate that this is a collective effort. It's community volunteering. We have 32 people that brought into this a lot of skills, diverse skills. And it's not only us mapping NGO, just special NGO, but it's also people that had no just special knowledge or no training, but got together with us and we're collaborating on producing this platform and this data. As I said, we're looking at multiple data sources. We looked at local authorities. We looked at national authorities. We have this communicate that we're with this report that we get from the authorities, but we also look at different other data that we could use to get something more in sight. So because of the nature of this data sets, the fact that they're being spread among different sources, they also come in different formats and so on. So sometimes it's a lot of unfiltered data and unstructured data. And we have to do all the manual or automatic where it's possible, filtering. Sometimes, for example, in reports you had this PDF that was unable to, we were unable to perform any character recognition. So we could extract the data automatically. So we had to do it manually and so on. And because of all these struggles and all this secrecy from the government, we issued this open data manifest, which I put here in the presentation. And this open data manifest is basically what we intended to be an outcry from the citizen initiatives towards the government. And it had some echoes as you've seen, they did something in the end, but it's not perfect. We do this collection of data every single day since last year in March, we've been collecting data daily. Daily is covering the media, not collecting data and daily trying to make it usable and put it into, to curate it in a way that it can be used by other people. We try to constantly update and improve our platform. That means that it's not only about the data that we have and the way that it is structured and the way that we curate it and the way that we look for additional information, but it's also the way that the platform integrates all this information. We use open source technologies to build our platform on and a variety of useful products that go into there from different technologies to different data sets that are additional to the health information that we get. And all our data is freely distributed, it's open access. We share it with the community, we share it with whoever wants to use it. And we also collaborate with some other initiatives to support them and they support us. Our platform is based on open source technologies that we have a backend that is no GS, PostgreSQL and PostGIS. We also have in the backend we collect the data for Google spreadsheets and all the posting for our platform is supported generously by the Sage group from the West University of Venezuela and that goes through Mozambique web services. The front end however is on multiple technologies because we had multiple skills. So some of us are more familiar with R in Chinese, some of us are more familiar with open layers, Angular, so basically JavaScript, or Python and closely and so on. And we also have some of the maps that are based on Google App Engine with subsequent data sets and Carto which generously supported us through their coronavirus program. As I said, all data is open for access, we distribute it through CSDs and whoever wants to integrate it has also dedicated API to do so for each data set. All the data that we have inside, so we have health data that we collect from authorities, that includes active cases, new cases, testing, death recoveries, vaccines and so on. We also have data that we collect from press releases or from the news, from the media itself, so we had that tool that was developed by Casa Journalist Rui which translates to Journalist House. It's an independent journalism outlet. And they helped us with this tool that helps us to look through a lot of newsletters and Carto media for additional information. We collaborate with Dragovanan from drafts.raw to calculate the R-Rite. He's a statistician. Sorry. We also have the health infrastructure, marginalized communities and their access to health infrastructure and some European context to date. Other data that we include is European mobility to understand the mobility patterns, points of interest. Other mobility data that is national from Apple, Google and Waze, air quality that we correlate with Sentinel-5P from the COMPARANICUS program and AIRLIVE which are ground-based sensors. We looked at voting and elections data, public interest in the COVID-19, sea water temperature for the summertime and basically all the indicators for impact, which is agricultural tourism, demographics, real estate, automotive industry, economy, communication and media so we could actively monitor how COVID is impacting all these sectors during the pandemic in Romania. So we could see through the data when we had different restrictions, what kind of impact they had or when we had an increased number of cases, what kind of impact they had. We got some media support as well. We got into some national news outlets and also sometimes they just reported using our platforms, sometimes they embedded and they collaborated with us. We got also in the international aggregators, news aggregators and so on, some support from Twitter community and we even got into research. So there are research articles that use our platform to get some insights and help their research. I'm just going to quickly get you through a demo so we could see our platform. So this is the dashboard when you enter. We have the number of confirmed cases, active cases, the new cases in the last 24 hours, whoever has been recovered, deaths, county level, locality level, so basically very granular data about number of cases, county level cases and quarantine areas. All this is summarized in these graphs here. We also have an English version that is not complete though. We have some maps on different thematic. So this is health infrastructure, we have a voting presence, European context, these are supported by the corridor. We have this map of a new two concentrations. And we also have vaccination map and a new statistics related to health indicators to help variables and also environment, public interest and so on. These are all very unstructured just because they come from different people, everybody contributed in a certain way, but we are working to make structure. And finally, we have this impact graphs that we call it the odd right now that measure the impact of COVID-19 over the Romanian society in general. So different indicators from county communications, populations and so on. Just to come to conclude, I'm very thankful that you follow this presentation. If you have additional questions, we are very open to answer them. We've got the contact here. And basically, we're looking forward to hear your thoughts about what we're doing if you have any suggestions for improvements and so on. I just want to thank again all my colleagues for doing this work for the last year and to really appreciate that we got some good appraisal from the public for this platform. Thank you very much. I hope you have a great post for you. Okay, really a pity that we don't have the opportunity to ask questions about this interesting presentation that was actually the last during this afternoon session. And for those of you who are still feeling we're continuing phospho G even today, there is the social gathering. So encourage everybody to show up there. Okay, have a continued nice day.
COVID-19 pandemic in Romania using phosphoG. But phosphoG to track the COVID-19 evolution in introduce our team. We are 32 people in this team of, it was very obvious with the situation that communicating, some of us contributed to just on the 17th of March 2020 for Romania. And it was institutionalized, they were in a hospital and from the point of view of the authorities because got to another milestone this year in March when, that were mapping the pandemic. The NGOs that effort. It's community volunteering. We have 32 authorities, but we also look at different other we have and the way that it is structured and the way that we curate it and the way that we look for additional information, but it's also the way information. We use open source technologies to additional to the health information that we get. access. We share it with the community, we share support them and they support us. Our platform is also have in the backend we collect the data for platform is supported generously by the Sage lot of newsletters and Carto media for additional their access to health infrastructure and some support as well. We got into some national news whoever has been recovered, deaths, county level, is not complete though. We have some maps on and a new statistics related to health indicators measure the impact of COVID-19 over the Romanian