Creating COVID-19 Maps

What are we doing?

There are an array of heroes doing great things to support the national COVID-19 response and our ambition is to map all their amazing efforts, so nobody is left out.

So please, support our survey data collection, if you can.

Firstly, we are mapping the background to COVID-19, in other words, providing up-to-date maps of the number of cases and fatalities for the whole of the UK, at the local level, putting all this data in one place on this website.

Against this background, we have been mapping the frontline responders at hospitals and paramedic units and those community responders who support not only the medical teams, but those people at home, especially the elderly and disabled, or single parents, who are now vulnerable. These community responders are a wonderfully diverse range of heroes including but not limited to; educational establishments, religious organisations, businesses, manufacturing, sport, transport, food bank charities and more.

One example are the secondary schools making personal protective equipment for local hospitals, which you will find in the map below.

Who are we doing it for?

We are primarily focused on acting local and concentrating on the UK. We are in touch with a number of UK organisations and crowd-sourcing citizens to providers with additional information about what and where activities are taking place. We have designed a form that can be filled out by organisations and citizens online to tell us where all of these wonderful things are happening.

As well as acting local, we are thinking globally and have several ideas on creating similar datasets for other countries such as Ethiopia, Nigeria and others to drive efforts related to COVID-19.

Why are we creating maps?

As well as pinpointing both the serious impacts of COVID-19 and where there are resources assisting frontline workers, we are collecting donations via the mapping website.

The maps provide both useful information to show where positive initiatives are, and donations available to support local and national frontline responders to fight the COVID-19 battle.

We intend to highlight local needs and local resources to work together more efficiently and funnel your donations to support these activities.

How we are creating the maps?

We are using open source GIS (Geographic Information Systems), open data such as Open Street Map and available data related to COVID-19 that other organisations are compiling or sharing.

We are also crowd-sourcing data online using forms which capture postcode data giving us the spatial location to locate these positive activities. We are creating a number of databases which are continually being updated.

The maps that we have created show different elements from the COVID-19 crisis across the UK by local authority. There are a number of different sources that we are using to collect or download data from. We are hoping that other relevant datasets to the COVID-19 response will be shared by others which we can incorporate into the maps.

By using GIS tools, we can symbolise, annotate and represent data effectively to illustrate many scenarios. “A picture is a thousand words”. Once the maps are ready to go online, we publish them and upload them onto our web map servers for all of you to access.

Over the next several months, we anticipate creating an assortment of maps showing positive scenarios such as a “football map” showing where in the UK, footballers and fans have donated or offered help to the frontline responders. We want some maps to be fun! Don’t forget to subscribe to our email newsletters so you can hear about the new maps we are making.