Just read this really cool article that discusses the use of spatio-temporal 3D bins of daily cases in Cantabria (a region in Spain). Would love to hear other people’s thoughts on this and if you’ve had any experience working with 3D bins of location data.
Interesting, thanks for sharing! If I understand correctly, the whole methodology relies on having individual home address data associated with every positive Covid case recorded case in this region. Do we even have data like that in the US?
> These daily files have a tabular structure with data on all individuals who have tested positive for COVID-19 in Cantabria. The microdata also include many fields related to different thematic areas: location (address, town, municipality and post code), demographic profile (gender, age and occupational category in the case of healthcare personnel) and, finally, health structure and virus details (start and end dates, allocated health area, COVID-19 status (positive if the virus is active, cured or deceased), test type, binary fields related to hospitalisation, intensive care unit and residential care homes (if the infected person lives in such a home)).
I think they are using Esri Geocoding to convert these home addresses into geospatial coordinates, and then using Esri tooling (“includes geographic, demographic and socioeconomic data from the ESRI COVID-19 GIS Hub”)
One thing that is powerful about this GIS approach is that it is agnostic to arbitrary government boundaries. “A factor or theory which is valid at the country level may not be so if it is desegregated at the departmental entity level or even at the neighbourhood level (detailed scales). Therefore, it is useful to implement a GIS structure, such as SITAR, with detailed data that could be aggregated into higher levels or entities if necessary.”
In other words, the tools/model is flexible to discover patterns at various geospatial scales, which seems important.
I don’t think this sort of granular data is generally available in the U.S. We mostly have positive case and testing data at the county level, and occasionally sub-county, depending on the county and state. Of course the individual / household level data should not be publicly available for privacy reasons, but I am not sure whether state or federal governments in the US are even collecting or tracking this sort of data to enable such a geospatial bin analysis.
Has anyone heard of that sort of data being available in the US or in other countries?
the closest i’ve seen to address-level has been on the provider-side (not patient side). the HHS does publish, on a per-facility basis, data like hospital/ICU capacity, ventilator usage, patient count, etc. So you can likely get a bit more granular than county - GitHub - CareSet/COVID_Hospital_PUF: The community created FAQ about the hospital-level COVID capacity data.