The Integrated Planning Executive Board (DEPI), through the Georeferencing Service Coordination, in partnership with the Health Area Executive Board (DEAS), created a interactive map (webmap) of Covid-19 cases being treated in Unicamp hospitals. The objective is to understand how the spread of Covid-19 cases and their distribution in the territory is happening. "The hospital das Clínicas and the health area of Unicamp serve the entire macro-region of Campinas. We didn’t have any visual tools to show this scope. This mapping is important in this sense, to show society and the government the extent of our area of activity”, said the rector of Unicamp, Marcelo Knobel.
O webmap provides geographic information in an interactive way from layers of data – the cases of Covid-19 that were treated at the Hospital das Clínicas of Unicamp, Cecom and Caism – and a set of specific information for each case. The DEPI Georeferencing Coordination team processes and geocodes this data, generating different points of the location of cases in several cities. “The detailed mapping of these cases can support immediate actions to combat the spread of the virus and provide immediate help to the most vulnerable population, in addition to medium and long-term public policies”, explains Vanderlei Braga, geographer and coordinator of this initiative at DEPI. “The main learning we have learned from this partnership is that the solutions to the crisis we are facing in this pandemic necessarily involve information. This has been the path adopted by countries that are dealing better with this problem”, said DEPI's executive director, Prof. Dr. Marco Aurelio Pinheiro Lima.
The data to feed the webmap are being provided by the Executive Directorate of the Health Area (DEAS), which organized a spreadsheet with the data of all patients, starting from the first confirmed case at Hospital das Clínicas, whose symptoms began on March 3rd. “Unicamp's care units - Hospital das Clínicas, CECOM and CAISM - care for patients and pass data on cases to DEAS. The Board then organizes the information into spreadsheets and forwards it to DEPI for georeferencing, always respecting the patient's privacy”, explained the executive director of DEAS, Prof. Dr. Manoel Barros Bertolo. “Identifying the region where patients with Covid-19 live is important because we can analyze, from an epidemiological point of view, the environment they frequent. This makes it possible to adopt preventive measures against the spread of the virus”, explains the doctor, who is also a professor at the Department of Clinical Medicine at the Faculty of Medical Sciences at Unicamp.
At DEPI, the data collected by DEAS is transformed into points on an interactive map. “This is done through a procedure called geocoding, in which it is possible to transform tabular data into georeferenced points on a map”, explained Marcelo Albieri, geographer who makes up the team for this project at DEPI. O webmap It is thematic, that is, the colors represent the age ranges of the patients and the shapes represent the hospital served. After that, the map is published in a dashboards (control panel), along with case count indicators and graphs, using the ArcGIS platform.
One of the results of the work was to generate a dynamic heat map. “This map shows some patterns of territorial concentration of confirmed cases and possible trends in the spread of the virus at local and regional scales”, explains Vanderlei. Until May 04th, 119 cases were confirmed with one death. The majority are women, 69,7% of cases, aged between 40 and 60 years.
Among the regions with the highest concentration, the region of Jardim Santa Genebra and Mansões Santo Antônio stands out, with nine confirmed cases that were attended to by Cecom. This information can help, for example, to guide the adoption of measures to contain the spread in these areas. “The conclusions can also help identify whether a certain region has an abnormal number of Covid-19 cases”, points out Bertolo. "Specifically in the case of the Covid-19 pandemic, this mapping will also be essential to monitor the evolution of the pandemic and how the cases are in our region”, stated Marcelo Knobel.
Updated daily, the web map can be accessed on the page from Unicamp about Covid-19 or directly at desktop version and mobile version.
