Decision support tools for responding to COVID-19

This page forms part of the COVID-19 Responses Collection.

The content below points to a range of decision support tools for modelling and planning for COVID-19.

• COVID-19 Vulnerability Dashboard for South Africa - This interactive, GIS-based platform developed by the CSIR, with conceptual input from the Albert Luthuli Centre for Responsible Leadership, is invaluable in assessing the vulnerability of geographic areas (at a StatsSA enumerator area level) to the potential impacts of COVID-19, pinpointing where large numbers of people are potentially susceptible, and finding out where existing living conditions could make it difficult to maintain social distancing and good basic hygiene in order to contain the spread of COVID-19.
   
• COVID-19 Corona Virus South African Resource Portal - This Department of Health (2020) resource provides current news and resources related to the Coronavirus.
   
• COVID-19 Critical Data - In this Green Book resource, van Niekerk, le Roux and Pieterse (2020) provide data that is critical in the early stages of the pandemic to the success of the subsequent phases that include response and recovery. These data help various departments improve their understanding of the risks posed by COVID-19 to communities and the health system, and the associated vulnerabilities.
   
• COVID-19 Modelling Webinar Series - To make public the thinking of statisticians, mathematicians and spatial modellers addressing the urgent need to understand the spread and impacts of Coronavirus in South Africa, this site houses a fascinating set of presentations and recordings from a weekly webinar.
   
• De-densifying Gauteng: A thought experiment - This interactive visualisation considers what it would take to bring population density down to a particular threshold, in terms of the number of people who would need to be moved from densely populated areas and the minimum land area that would be required for their relocation.
   
• Responses to mitigate the impacts of COVID-19 - In this resource, the Cities Support Programme (2020) collates the economic responses by cities around the world, as well as South African support measures that have been announced, including the three spheres of government, business, and civil society. This resource also includes sites that track support measures.
   
• University COVID-19 Dashboard - This interactive web-based dashboard was developed by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University, to visualize and track reported COVID-19 cases in real-time. The dashboard illustrates the location and number of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths and recoveries for all affected countries. It was developed to provide researchers, public health authorities and the general public with a user-friendly tool to track the outbreak as it unfolds.
   
• Bond: Covid-19 advice and resources - This is a collation of guidance, learning and resources that relate to international development, peace-building and humanitarian response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Bond is a UK network for organisations working in international development. It regularly updates this list to support organisations' operations, fundraising, programmes, staff and volunteers.
   

Photo Credit: Shayne Robinson