
Case Study
COVID-19 DATA ANALYSIS
COVID-19 DATA ANALYSIS
Objective
Understanding the spread of the disease and using existing data traffic as the backbone for effective action and impact assessment in Ghana.
The Challenge
The absence of accurate data location has been a decisive challenge in the context of the governments’
and decision-makers’ growing efforts to control the spread of the pandemic. This was the specific case of
Ghana before the actual Covid-19 spread in the country.
The goal was to build automated systems that provide insights into crowd movement, show dashboards
with heatmaps and rapid indexes to describe how the situation unfolded.
At the start of 2018 Ghana Statistical Office launched an initiative with only one mobile operator in Ghana
to analyse mobility data in the network. This has resulted in some valuable insights, but does not cover
the whole population.
The Proposed Solution
In order to address this issue, the Common Platform that already collected information for revenue
assurance purposes was upgraded to include also location of events. This allowed aggregation of data
from all mobile operators and underlying quality assurance process guarantees that the dataset could
be trusted and was representative of the whole population.
The mobility intel helped to generate maps that provided county-level information about distance and
commutes frequency of subjects.
A comprehensive analytical system to track mobility data.
Achievements
We have seen that most importantly, all the mobility data correlated and described what the situation
on the ground was like and therefore provided trend indication.
The effects of lockdown were clearly seen. Mobility of people decreased rapidly, once the lockdown was
in effect and also it was visible how people progressively grew tired of the lockdown and started slowly
moving around again.
Once the country borders were officially closed, only severely decreased mobility from neighbouring
countries remained. Granted, it decreased by about 66%, but it still remained.
What Covid-19 Tracker enabled:
- Predictive analysis
- Identification of population movements among quarantined subjects
- Drafting a global domestic pandemic picture
- Mobility patterns, analysis and metrics
- Contact tracing
- Sharing virus spread stats with competent authorities for decision-making purposes