The Covid-19 data tracker is available on the University’s website allowing members of the public to access a visual comparator of collated Covid-19 data from official government and health sources across the island of Ireland. The tracker reports cases at the local government district in Northern Ireland and county level across the island of Ireland, providing gender and age breakdowns of reported cases, growth rates, and statistics per 100,000 of the population.
The tracker also visualizes changes in daily mobility by region and across different categories of places and activities using Google and Apple feeds. The collation of the figures aims to help viewers access temporal continuity through comparison in data fields over time.
Dr Magda Bucholc, Lecturer in Data Analytics (George Moore Fellow) from the School of Computing, Engineering and Intelligent Systems at Ulster University has been compiling the available Northern Ireland data since mid-March and has recently added the same data parameters from the Republic of Ireland.
The data curation is now coordinated by a larger team including Dr Magda Bucholc, Dr Matthew Manktelow, and Mr Kevin Blake.
Dr Magda Bucholc commented:
“The availability of accurate and timely data to aid decision making is vital, especially during a global pandemic and the Covid-19 tracker from Ulster aims to provide this much needed information to the general public in a format that is easy to understand, digest and used for comparison across regions, times and now across both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
The Covid-19 tracker is updated daily using official sources of information and since its implementation we’ve received almost 40,000 website views. As a civic university we’re committed to playing our part in the fight against coronavirus and will continue to provide this essential data for as long as it is required.”
This project is supported by the Dr George Moore Endowment for Data Science at Ulster University and the European Union’s INTERREG VA Programme, managed by the Special EU Programmes Body (SEUPB) (The Centre for Personalised Medicine Clinical Decision Making & Patient Safety).