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Officials in Suffolk County, NY, have found themselves repeatedly turning to questions of geography at regular pandemic response meetings over the past year.

“One of the common questions I get is, ‘Where is bad? Dr. Harsha Rajashekharaiah, the county’s senior project coordinator for the Covid-19 response, said. “Where is the Covid transmission bad? Where is the testing bad? Where should we improve? Where should we invest our resources?”

To find the answers, Dr. Rajashekharaiah used geospatial data by waving brightly colored maps that pinpoint neighborhoods where cases are increasing or testing rates are lagging.

And once vaccinations began, he began using digital mapping tools, commonly known as geographic information systems or GIS software, to explore how vaccination rates varied across the county and correlated with various demographic factors.

A few patterns soon appeared on color-coded maps. In March, for example, magenta spots on the borough’s west side made it clear that vaccination rates were low in neighborhoods where residents were highly non-English speaking. After presenting the map to their colleagues, they quickly added Spanish and Haitian Creole language assistance to their state vaccination hotline.

Over the next few months, parts of the map turned yellow or even green as vaccination rates increased in these neighborhoods. Dr. “I can’t sit here and conclude that the reason this happened is because of our GIS system,” Rajashekharaiah said. However, he added, “GIS has been a very, very powerful tool for us to communicate these barriers.”

Amid the highly uneven distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, many health authorities and community organizations are using geospatial data to plan their vaccination campaigns and track their progress in fine detail. Esri, a California-based company that produces widely used GIS software, says hundreds of organizations around the world, including many US states and more than 20 national governments, are using digital mapping tools to help them arm themselves.

Esri’s chief medical officer, Dr. “GIS and mapping tools were really important in helping these health departments get people vaccinated – to be more organized, more organized and strategic and even tactical in the process,” Este Geraghty said.

Digital maps, which allow authorities to quickly identify vaccine deserts, identify high-risk populations and target their resources more efficiently, have become crucial tools in an effort to ensure that vaccination campaigns leave no neighborhood behind.

location, location, location

As the virus spread rapidly in Wisconsin in the spring of 2020, officials in Milwaukee County began to worry about the unequal toll. For example, in late March and early April, Black residents accounted for 69 percent of Covid deaths in the county, despite only making up 27 percent of its population. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee report.

These inequalities were at the forefront when Covid-19 vaccines were finally allowed. “We wanted to make sure we were distributing this vaccine fairly,” said Milwaukee County administrator David Crowley.

They began to categorize censuses according to vaccination rates and scores of a national “national”.social security deficit indexThe index uses data on 15 different social, economic, and demographic factors, including local poverty and unemployment rates, as well as age, minority status, and residents’ education levels, to calculate how susceptible a particular region is. the community will be in the event of some kind of disaster such as a hurricane or an epidemic.

The authorities then published the results online. a color-coded map. In mid-March, when the county first launched, much of the city of Milwaukee was painted dark orange, indicating the area had high levels of social security but low vaccination rates.

On the other hand, suburbs where the population is wealthier and whiter are shaded in light yellow, suggesting they score low on the vulnerability index but have soaring vaccination rates. “And so there was a story about the rich and the poor or two different cities,” he said. Overseeing the medical aspects of the county’s Covid-19 response, Dr. Ben Weston.

County and city officials began pouring resources into dark orange neighborhoods, prioritizing these residents for vaccination appointments, adding more vaccination locations to these areas, and creating pop-up sites and events in churches, refectories, libraries, schools, and cultural centers. They’ve also launched a community ambassador program – Crush Covid Crew – to train volunteers from these dark orange census districts to talk to their neighbors about vaccines and disseminate misinformation about them.

Vaccination rates in the most vulnerable areas are still lagging, but have more than tripled since mid-March. Dr. “The darkest orange communities are now gone,” Weston said. “So we’re making progress.”

dose delivery

NS count me too The Georgia initiative, created by the Georgia Democrats’ former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, took a similar approach. But instead of focusing on vaccination rates, mapped vaccination sites Overlaying data statewide and later on potential barriers to vaccination, including lack of computer access and low rates of car ownership.

The map revealed a number of potential hotspots, particularly in rural, southwestern Georgia. “We’ve seen this huge concentration of people with very limited vaccine access,” said Ali Bustamante, senior research fellow at the Southern Project for Economic Progress, which runs the initiative with the nonprofit Fair Count. “There were very few vaccination sites, but they also faced major access restrictions.”

The groups partnered with vaccine providers to send mobile clinics to some of these vaccine deserts and launched an all-out research effort, borrowing the tools of a political campaign to encourage people to get vaccinated. Volunteers ultimately made 79,000 phone calls, relayed vaccination information to 17,000 doors, and helped secure 4,500 vaccination appointments. Dr. Bustamante said, “We have seen that the vaccine gap has closed significantly, especially in rural areas.”

Geospatial data is also critical to logistics. Luis Sanz, CEO of the company, said that Carto, a cloud-based platform for analyzing geospatial data, has helped dozens of logistics companies around the world optimize their vaccine storage and transportation networks for faster and more efficient distribution of vaccines.

And in Clackamas County, Oregon, GIS data has become the backbone of efforts to vaccinate home-bound people. “Because we are a large county with somewhat rural areas, we have some transportation issues and access is a challenge for many of our residents.” said Kim La Croix, a public health program manager for the county. “These mass vaccination sites were not accessible to home-bound seniors and home-bound people with mental, developmental, or physical disabilities.”

When residents call or email the county to request vaccinations at home, staff save their location, which pops up on a digital map. They then review the map showing the number and type of vaccines requested throughout the county, while determining specific appointment intervals. The aim is to reduce nurses’ travel time, maximize the number of injections they give in a day, and minimize waste by ensuring that the number of doses a nurse delivers in a shift equals the number of doses in a vial..

follow the instructions

In low- and middle-income countries, basic geographic data on how many people need to be vaccinated and where they live were critical to the success of previous mass vaccination campaigns. For example, nearly a decade ago, government officials and global health experts announced that polio vaccination teams in northern Nigeria they were using wrong, hand-drawn maps.

“There were missing settlements, wrong settlement names,” said Emilie Schnarr, Nigeria project manager for the Geo-Referenced Infrastructure and Development or Demographic Data for GRID3 program. “And that was one of the reasons children were abducted.”

Before it reached these children, the highly contagious polio virus was likely to continue circulating. In the years that followed, the Nigerian government, in partnership with various global health organizations, used satellite imagery and local field teams to create detailed, high-resolution maps, filling in missing buildings, settlements and local points of interest.

The maps have helped Nigeria eradicate the polio that the country is suffering from. finally achieved last year. And GRID3, born from these efforts, has recently distributed updated maps to local authorities in Nigeria, which they are using to plan and track their Covid-19 vaccination campaigns.

They are not alone. In March, five organizations specializing in geographic data and information management – Alcis, CartONG, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, iMMAP and MapAction – joined forces to launch the Geographic Information Management Initiative for Covid-19 Vaccine Delivery. Their aim is to help 15 low-income countries, including Haiti, Sudan and Bangladesh, fill in the gaps in their geographic data and then use that information to deliver vaccines to their residents.

This work will be beneficial not only for this epidemic, but also for the provision of all kinds of basic services by ensuring that local health authorities know where their citizens live and where they live. to be able to help them meet their needs.

“Being on the map is for acceptance,” said Ivan Gayton, senior humanitarian adviser for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. “Every community in the world should be able to put themselves on the map.”