COVID-19 has affected us all – but our experiences as a result of the pandemic are not the same. Where you live may have made a difference to your experience of the pandemic.
Understanding the impacts of restrictions and policy responses on people in different locations is difficult but government and analysts are using data to understand and visualise the impact of pandemic decision making on a suburb-by-suburb basis.
A geographic information system (GIS) developed by researchers at the UTS Data Science Institute is the key.
The problem
COVID-19 restrictions and the resulting government policy responses impacted NSW communities in different ways. For the NSW Government, understanding the scale of these impacts on different Local Government Authorities (LGAs) has been essential in decision making and supporting social and economic recovery across the state.
The opportunity
Partnering with the NSW Government, UTS researchers developed the GIS to model the impact of COVID-19 and government policy responses on different LGAs. The GIS includes three modules: business impact, tenancy hardship and vulnerable cohorts.
Various datasets, including information from Transport NSW, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, NSW Fair Trading and publicly available real estate, health and wellbeing information, were used to produce a series of location-based, interactive heat maps to identify and describe the impacts of lockdown and changing community behaviours over time.
These heat maps focused on specific social indicators, including the housing market, risks to vulnerable cohorts, traffic patterns and delays, and economic activity. Map data demonstrated how and where COVID-19 was having the greatest impact. For example, one set of heat maps might demonstrate changes to monthly rental costs and rental demand levels, helping lenders to monitor and measure market trends and the resulting financial impacts. Another might show changing COVID-19 risk levels for vulnerable cohorts, such as homeless people and those in aged care, enabling optimal resource allocation for people and regions in need.
This data provided a visual demonstration of how and where COVID-19 was having the greatest impact, enabling the government to respond appropriately to current challenges and plan for future scenarios.
The impact
The research team delivered weekly GIS report cards to the NSW Premier’s Insights team, providing data-driven results that supported fast and evidence-based decision-making during the rapidly unfolding crisis. The NSW Government was able to use the heat maps, as well as machine learning models, that revealed correlations between different social indicators, to determine how best to support LGAs and their unique demographics. The NSW Government was also equipped to better predict which LGAs were at risk of future impacts from the pandemic.
The GIS platform can be used beyond COVID-19 social indicators. It can also be applied to other time periods, community-level activities and social events as well as used predictively. This makes the GIS platform a valuable scenario planning tool during any other periods of crisis and more.
Where to next?
Interested in learning more about how this problem was solved?
We've created a self-paced, free online case study, Analysing COVID-19 Impacts in LGAs (NSW), that showcases how data was used to solve this problem.
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