A team, with the participation of researchers from the Bellvitge Institute for Biomedical Research (IDIBELL), has designed a new web application to compare epidemiological indicators of the Covid-19 epidemic globally. The new tool, free and open access, offers a complete overview of the pandemic, and any user can easily and intuitively visualize the main epidemiological indicators of all the affected countries, with data updated daily.
The app, developed in collaboration with teams from the Institute of Environmental Diagnosis and Water Studies (IDAEA-CSIC), the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) and the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), uses official data that is updated daily by the European Center for Disease Prevention (ECDC). From them, it calculates and visualizes the main epidemiological indicators: the rates of accumulated and incident cases, accumulated and incident mortality, lethality (people affected by the disease) and the basic reproduction number, that is the capacity of the virus to spread from infected to uninfected people.
“There are different web applications to follow the evolution of the pandemic. Most of them use infected cases and death toll, usually show the results on maps. The advantages of the Covid19-Global application are, on the one hand, that it integrates all the epidemiological indicators on the same website, without the need to navigate through several different pages. On the other hand, it allows for easier comparison of the evolution between countries over time, in daily and accumulated terms”, explains Aurelio Tobías, researcher at IDAEA-CSIC.
The new tool, an extension of the Covid19-Tracker online program that follows the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in Spain, allows comparing epidemiological indicators between countries on the current date or from date 0 of the epidemic in each country.
“The Covid19-Global application is of interest to the scientific community, the health community and, of course, to public agents involved in managing the health crisis. It can also be useful for the media interested in covering and monitoring the pandemic, as well as for citizens”, highlights Tobías.
The app is available online on: https://ubidi.shinyapps.io/covid19global/
Tobías A, Satorra P, Valls J, Tebé C. COVID19-Global: A shiny application to perform a global comparative data visualization for the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic.medRxiv.DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.05.18.20105684
Valls J, Tobías A, Satorra P, Tebé C. COVID19-Tracker: una aplicación Shiny para analizar datos de la epidemia de SARS-CoV-2 en España. Gaceta Sanitaria. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gaceta.2020.04.002