Covid Policy Tracker (http://www.policytracker.xyz/)
by UHA
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGFpUuf27LQ
The Covid Policy Tracker provides a concise and easy-to-understand visualization of the effectiveness of policies put forth by various nations to control the Covid-19 outbreak. All of the aggregated statistics are presented in a timeline format. The historical progression of Covid-19 in each country is compared with the policies enacted by the country to control the spread of the virus. Those wanting quick information about the timeline of major events relating to the virus outbreak would be able to easily find it on our website. Those looking for more specific information could easily use our tool to compare between different countries and see which policies were effective.
With rumours of a potential second wave hitting this fall, our team believes that informing the general public of the effectiveness of various Covid-19 countermeasures and policies is a very important task, as doing so allows the public to advocate for the best decisions going forward. By introducing various approaches to tackling Covid-19 and their widely varying success, our tool allows individuals to directly compare the success of one policy with another.
Once entering the tracker page, a graph with confirmed, recovered, and deaths from Covid-19 will appear, along with vertical red lines. Each vertical line represents a day when a certain policy was enacted. For example, you can see that on March 12th, Poland set their internal movement restriction policy to level 1 (recommended restriction), while Puerto Rico and Ukraine set theirs to level 2. We hope that by filtering through different countries and seeing what policies they have enacted, it would be easier for the public to look at the chart and get an idea of which policies are effective. However, we do not encourage individuals to interpret their own data and go against government orders.
It’s no secret that many countries have been attempting to reduce and eliminate those victim to covid-19. Governments have enacted various restrictions on civilians by closing workplaces, schools, and even public events, hence why this event had to be held online. As much as some people may be annoyed that they can’t go outside to play with friends, or are unable to work due to their job not being deemed “essential”, we must realize that social distancing and these policies do in fact work, and citizen cooperation is required to flatten the curve. We hope that by showing each policy and their outcomes, people may have an understanding of why it’s important to listen to government orders, possibly preventing a larger outbreak.
Web App: The frontend is built with bootstrap and integrated with our Express server to send data to the browser. The Chart.js library was used to display our data points. Web app is deployed on Heroku.
Data collection: Using data collected from John Hopkins University, the web app is able to visualize current Covid figures. Policy data is obtained through web-scraping.
This project is only intended as a reference; it should not be an excuse to disregard government policies and law.
A potential issue with analyzing the effectiveness of a certain policy by comparing it with the number of Covid-19 cases is that a simple visualization based approach does not accurately portray all external factors. Correlation != Causation.
Creating an algorithm to group together specific policies for users to more easily view which type of policies are in effect.
An algorithm to weigh these policy groups based on their efficiency and costs.
Collecting additional data to graph, such as Covid’s impact on certain demographics so that its benefit can be compared with the policies.<b>
Smarter policy collection from various trusted sources rather than a single site.
An expansion beyond policies to take into account major external events such as protests or disasters. Will help to clarify increases or decreases in the data.
Our team hopes that this resource can be developed to the point where it can accurately weigh the effectiveness of a policy if it were to be implemented at any given time.
Our team members Hanmin Kim, Victor Vannara, Samuel Jeon, and Charley Lee for making this possible. All four team members are Canadian grade 11 Port Moody Secondary students. We share a passion for computer programming and engineering!
Sahat Yalkabov for open-sourcing the Hackathon Starter which provides the barebone structure of the web app
https://github.com/sahat/hackathon-starter
Oleksii Trekhleb for his open-sourced Covid-19 dashboard https://github.com/trekhleb/covid-19/
John Hopkins University for making their Covid data easy accessible via GitHub. https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19
HTML 5 https://html5up.net/ for the website template theme, Stellar.
Unsplash https://unsplash.com/ for the stock images seen on the website.
Pexels https://www.pexels.com/videos/ for free stock video
Kevin MacLeod and Incompetech for royalty-free music https://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/music.html
Namecheap https://www.namecheap.com/ for providing us our domain, http://www.policytracker.xyz/
Heroku https://www.heroku.com/ for providing an easy to use server platform.
MARVIN
Heroku
Node.js
JavaScript
Express
Bootstrap
Chart.js
MongoDB
Our World in Data provides our policy data. https://ourworldindata.org/policy-responses-covid
“Policy Responses to COVID19.” Policy Responses to Covid-19, International Monetary Fund, www.imf.org/en/Topics/imf-and- covid19/Policy-Responses-to-COVID-19.
Ritchie, Hannah. “Policy Responses to the Coronavirus Pandemic - Statistics and Research.” Policy Responses to the
Coronavirus Pandemic, Our World in Data, ourworldindata.org/policy-responses-covid.
Below is the link of our promotional video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGFpUuf27LQ