COVINFORM - Technical Report
Creators: name: Bonavita, Ilaria
name: Aspell, Niamh
name: Maitland, Emily
name: Buckley, Matt
name: Plakazhi, Nanditha
name: Wadhwa, Kush
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023

description: The COVINFORM project investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic across the 27 EU member states (MS) and the UK. National, regional, and local responses varied in success due to the changeable nature of the public health crisis and the level of preparedness and adaptability of governing institutions. Whilst the general population in the EU and UK experienced disruptive and life changing consequences, the impacts were not equally experienced, and notable differences were evidenced in certain social clusters. In the COVINFORM project we pay particular focus on those vulnerable and marginalised groups. One of the projects outputs includes an interactive risk assessment dashboard that centres on various types of vulnerability (i.e., physical, social, economic and information) and the related consequences, within the context of COVID-19. Extensive work was undertaken to appropriately define the risk assessment framework, this will ultimately provide a risk score for each country and will be visualised on the geospatial dashboard. This included engagement with all project stakeholders to inform the various types of indicators that are best used to quantitatively represent key domains, such as social vulnerability, within the context of COVID-19. This was after a review of the literature and finally the identification of such data routinely collected in the EU and UK. Following data collection, the secondary data requires pre-processing for in-depth modelling that will provide insights for various stakeholders (e.g., policy makers, first responders and researchers). For example, the contribution of certain features of vulnerability which are highly correlated to the consequences of COVID-19, such as poorer physical health or dependency on social supports. These insights will offer stakeholders the opportunity to explore their assumptions of risk, particularly for vulnerable groups, during public health crisis and ultimately inform their future responses.

This report provides an overview of the technical work undertaken in the development of the risk assessment model and the interactive dashboard. It includes an update on activities relating to the collection and processing of national level quantitative data across the EU27 MS and the UK. Various qualitative data will also be integrated into the dashboard to allow for both consideration of the impacts and response of COVID-19 on vulnerable groups as defined by the COVINFORM case studies. A summary of identified data sources and indicators to be integrated into the risk assessment model under the domains of threat, vulnerability, consequences, and resilience is also included in this report. In addition, we describe the process followed to download, clean, and reformat data for ingestion into our data model and in preparation for storage in a database. This includes standardising dates and region names as well as removing unexpected characters from numerical data and discarding redundant or unnecessary data. We also describe the risk framework and how this is mapped to our modelling procedure, as well as provide technical details of this modelling and how we compute preliminary scores from the data we have collected so far. A preview of these results is given alongside some commentary. Finally, we describe the software used to carry out this work, as well as the plans for the continuation of this data collection and data analysis work and development of the dashboard tool.