Geographic Data for Public Health Decision-Making for COVID-19 Pandemic (FOSS4G 2021)

Author

María Nanton

Published

October 1, 2021

In our talk “The Importance of Geographic Data for Public Health Decision-Making During the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Experience of the Health Information and Statistics Management Office of Buenos Aires City” we reviewed the experience of designing and implementing a data science project to aid public health decisions making using geographical data of patients with Covid-19, developed by the Information Management and Health Statistics Office of the City of Buenos Aires that I’m a part of.

Buenos Aires, a very heterogeneous city in terms of population density and social stratification, with a corresponding geographic correlation, presented unique challenges to this effort.

Aspects related to the specificity of the difficulties of georeferencing people in general and in the 2020 healthcare context, the technical problems encountered in the process and their resolution, as well as the role of free and open source software tools that allowed the success of the project were reviewed in our talk.