Using Data & Maps to Analyze England's Response to COVID-19

i-sense started in October 2013 as a five-year, £11M Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (IRC), funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). In 2018, i-sense received Next Steps funding from the EPSRC for a further four years of research.

i-sense aims to build a new generation of digital sensing systems to identify and prevent outbreaks of infectious disease and antimicrobial resistance, much earlier than ever before. Early detection and accurate diagnosis is key to helping patients gain faster access to care and protecting populations from disease.

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Public Health England, National Health Service (NHS) and the Office of National Statistics (ONS) publish daily or weekly data related to the pandemic response. This data is often difficult to interpret to understand how effectively the system is running.

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Researchers from i-sense developed a dashboard to evaluate the performance of the ‘Find, Test, Trace, Isolate, Support’ system by collating publicly available data into a single place. This work received mapping support from the CARTO Grants for Good program.

The Find section of the dashboard includes two interactive maps. The first shows the estimated percentage of the total population testing positive with the second displaying symptom reports to the NHS, from the last 7 days by location. Understanding where COVID-19 is spreading is crucial to quickly control new outbreaks and reduce transmission.

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Governments and corporate organizations are using Google Cloud Platform with CARTO to create intuitive dashboards in the cloud.

Whether you are building dashboards such as this, running PPE supply chains, planning returns to the workplace, or involved in economic recovery use cases - having the right tools in place to make data-driven decisions is fundamental.

For more details on this customer story, read the full blog post.

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​​CARTO is the Location Intelligence platform built to run natively within your Google Cloud’s BigQuery lakehouse. This seamless integration breaks down GIS data silos, empowering you to transform spatial analysis into business-critical decisions directly inside your cloud environment.

CARTO’s platform eliminates slow and ungovernable ETL processes, and ensures enterprise-grade speed, scalability and security. Your geospatial teams gain native access to the full power of Google Cloud’s open, serverless architecture - including Apache Iceberg with BigLake, BigQuery ML, Vertex AI, and Google Maps APIs. In addition, CARTO offers rich geospatial visualizations, an advanced Analytics Toolbox, a low-code design and automation environment, and app development toolkits - all available through Google Cloud Marketplace.

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