African COVID19-Response

[johav]

Add any information, resources and mitigation strategies we can pull together to support all levels of societies on the continent to mitigate the coronavirus pandemic.

All comments, contributions, questions, and concerns are welcome.

We treat this the same as any of our other initiatives and approaches - decentrally, Africa-owned, in partnership with any other (primarily yet not exclusively African) stakeholders.

[brucellino]

I can report some data sets from South Africa. I am not personally involved - this is driven by @dsfsi to my knowledge

• https://github.com/dsfsi/covid19za
• https://sacoronavirus.co.za/

I was involved in the 🇮🇹 response , co-ordinated by the Italian Civil Protection Agency - https://github.com/pcm-dpc/COVID-19

The general approach of having a national dashboard, overlaid on the national territory, with areas of containment, epidemiological statistics, etc, seems to be very useful.

The first, to my knowledge was the Johns Hopkins map. This was used at the national level by Italy - http://opendatadpc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/b0c68bce2cce478eaac82fe38d4138b1

It would be nice if folks could help the Africa CDC do something similar.

But I still maintain that the most useful information and dashboards of these kind are national. People want to know what is happening at home.

Great care should be taken to ensure provenance of the data. The Italians applied the CC-BY license to their data, which seems to have worked.

Also of interest was the "Digital Solidarity" decree by the Italian government - https://innovazione.gov.it/coronavirus-la-digitalizzazione-a-supporto-delle-zone-rosse/ (unfortuately only in Italian).

The Ministry has agreements with the major cloud providers to provide free acess to citizens and business affected. There is also a plan for national providers to participate, and obtain tax breaks. I am not aware of anything similar in Africa.

I can say that one of the most dangerous things in this initial period is lack of access to trustworthy information. During press conferences and normal operations, Italian government websites often crashed under load - a similar thing is happening now with normal services like accessing school and workplace updates. A volunteer team from the Italian Digital Agency - https://www.agid.gov.it/ and AWS is working to apply content delivery network layers to mitigate the load. This will be extremely important.

[johav]

How about http://covid-19-africa.sen.ovh/ ?

How can we best turn the resources into reusable resources (licensing & quality control) and easily adaptable to each nation's response strategy?

[brucellino]

How about http://covid-19-africa.sen.ovh/ ?

This unfortunately does not seem to state the provenance of the data.

[johav]

List of stakeholders: https://info.africarxiv.org/stakeholders/

Add more at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uZxnVUDdFmnC6tKr016cUYdk6o51WGcOnQkF09vY8EY/