Description
Understanding a pandemic means looking beyond infection rates: examining how societies, economies and health systems change, and how response measures affect them. PERISCOPE, a European project funded by Horizon 2020 and coordinated by the University of Pavia, brought together multidisciplinary expertise to analyse the impacts of COVID-19 and strengthen preparedness for future emergencies.
Within this framework, the Geomatics Laboratory at DICAr contributed to coordinating and developing the COVID Atlas, a digital atlas designed to make information from different sources and disciplines accessible and explorable. The work addressed three closely connected dimensions: the pandemic’s socioeconomic effects, public health and health systems, and the policies adopted to mitigate its consequences.
Using GIS and WebGIS tools, data are presented through interactive maps showing their geographical distribution and evolution over time. Comparing areas, indicators and periods makes complex patterns easier to interpret and provides an integrated perspective on the changes associated with the pandemic.
The laboratory’s contribution highlights the value of geospatial information for understanding and communicating complex phenomena: turning heterogeneous data into meaningful information that supports research and public decision-making. This approach helps explain what happened and informs better responses to future crises.
Pubblications
Rocca, M.T., Casella, V.M., Baldin, C.M., 2021. COVID-19 e informazione geografica. Spatial enablement di dati relativi alle politiche, alla salute e all’economia nell’ambito del progetto H2020 PERISCOPE. Atti della Conferenza ASITA 2021, pp. 379–392. https://asitait.serversicuro.it/atti/ASITA2021/Pdf/049.pdf
Parimbelli, E., Larizza, C., Urosevic, V., Pogliaghi, A., Ottaviano, M., Cheng, C., Benoit, V., Pala, D., Casella, V.M., Bellazzi, R., Giudici, P., 2022. The PERISCOPE Data Atlas: A Demonstration of Release v1.2. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 13263, pp. 412–415. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09342-5_41
Rocca, M.T., Casella, V.M., 2024. Next Pandemic Preparedness: A Focus on Health Data Standardization and Readiness for Spatial Enablement. Geomatics for Environmental Monitoring: From Data to Services, Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2088, pp. 218–242. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-59925-5_16
