Over recent months since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, a great deal of data has been compiled relating to reported cases of Covid-19, as well as data relating to the spread of the illness. A number of institutions have made some of this data publicly available - and a good deal of it is geographical in some way.
GeoDirectory hosted a
webinar with
IRLOGI and guest speaker Professor Chris Brunsdon to dive into the data available and to show how it can be used to understand the spread of Covid-19
The purposes of this webinar was:
- To highlight some of the open data that is available;
- Show how the programming language R (also freely available) can be used to;
- Consider the degree to which this open data may be manipulated, visualised and analysed in order to gain some understanding of the spread of Covid-19;
- Highlight the effectiveness of various measures that have been used to control and inhibit the spread;
- Showcase how freely available software and data can provide insights to this important topic.
Examples specific to Ireland, as well as worldwide data were demonstrated.
View the webinar here
Professor Chris Brunsdon is the Director of The National Centre for Geocomputation at Maynooth University, Ireland. Professor Brunsdon commenced his NCG post in 2014. He joined Maynooth University from the University of Liverpool where he served as Professor of Human Geography.He is one of the developers of the widely used Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) data analysis technique. He is currently a member of the Irish Epidemiology Modelling Advisory Group, and has recently published the article "Modelling epidemics: Technical and critical issues in the context of COVID-19" in Dialogues in Human Geography.