# The Assessment of COVID-19 Vulnerability Risk for Crisis Management
## 1 Introduction  
The end of 2019 brought the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 followed by introducing a global state of emergency that affected the lives of people around the world [1, 2]. For this reason, it became a popular subject of research for scientists from various disciplines. The spatial nature of the pandemic determines the increasing number of articles with the use of spatial data. Among them, the discussion on new challenges in operational crisis management and the role of spatial information and spatial technologies is visible [3]. The search performed on the \"crisis management\" phrase only in the Web of Science database (WoS) resulted in 59,138 research items (as of 20 October 2021), 5620 of them have been published in 2021, and 4424 were related to the pandemic of COVID-19. This leads to the conclusion that the problem of crisis management is a hot topic of science. In order to identify the ongoing trends in literature, \"crisis management spatial analysis\" research was performed and the obtained results were presented with the use of Weighted Network Visualization (WNV) shown in Figure 1.  
The WNV was prepared with the use of the fractionalization method for normalizing the strength of the links between items [4]. The bigger the label, the higher the weight of certain terms. The colours are determined by the cluster to which the term belongs, while lines represent links: the closer two terms appear, the stronger the correlation between them. For example, Geographic Information System (GIS) is strongly related to \"vulnerability\", \"model\", \"framework\" etc. The homonyms joining were not performed. The WNV shows a strong presentation of management, crisis, model, and GIS in the body of literature. Also, well-established trends on the possible applications of spatial analysis and SMCA (the analyses take into consideration a group of variable factors and assess their changes over time) were noticeable in broadly understood decision process and decision management with: suitability map [5; 6; 7; 8; 9], scenario evaluation method [10; 11; 12], resources allocation [13], transportation and vehicle routing [14; 15; 16; 17; 18], impact assessment [19; 20; 21], location migration and allocation [13; 20; 22; 23], risk management and natural hazards occurrence can be noted [2; 24; 25; 26; 27; 28; 29; 30; 31; 32]. This state according to [33; 30; 34; 35] will persist, driven by the new applications of spatial analysis in GIS, and will include crisis management aspects. More detailed analysis shows the use of the GIS environment [36; 37; 38] with recently developed methodologies to support the decision-making process in crisis management at the local level [29; 39] and it is emphasized that its essential part was the visualisation of crisis progress, shown with the use of interactive, realistic, large-scale simulations [40]. The results of analyses may be used in several crisis situations like flooding, landslides [24; 41] or for vulnerability or risk index estimation of selected areas or infrastructure elements [40; 42; 43; 44] in order to provide the recommendation for the administrative strategies to minimize the social and economic effects of crisis situations [32; 45; 46; 47]. According to the authors, the vulnerability index [31], susceptibility models, or susceptibility maps [48; 49] should be determined with the use of different methods [50], depending on the area and crisis situation in order to ensure optimal performance and reliable results [51; 52]. Reliability of results depends on the accuracy of data which is one of the crucial problems revealed in publications on spatial data next to the techniques for information extraction [24; 41; 53; 54].