RAPID: Tracking the Spatiotemporal Dynamics of the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Arctic

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This RAPID award supports the development and deployment of a real-time web-based COVID-19 data hub managed by an interdisciplinary team of experts in data science, geoinformatics, epidemiology and geography. The team will collect, analyze, and disseminate data on the spatial and temporal dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Arctic. Both datasets and analyses of spatiotemporal trends at the subregional level will be made available to stakeholders including Arctic residents, researchers, and policymakers. Pandemic data will be contextualized through the collection of first-person accounts of the COVID-19 experience in Arctic communities. The team will also develop geovisualization tools and analyze datasets to address urgent questions related to the spread and geography of COVID-19 in the Arctic, assessing containment and mitigation policies and evaluating whether case fatality rates are affected by environmental, socioeconomic, and/or geographic variables. Long-term curation of Arctic COVID-19 data and data products will ensure availability for future analysis, historical study and policy consideration. Methods: The research team will build on their expertise in collection and analysis of diverse, multilingual datasets relevant to the incidence and spread of COVID-19 in the Arctic. Georeferenced quantitative data from North America, Scandinavia, and Russia will be collected from publicly available databases; variables will include basic demographic data, and rates of testing, morbidity, and mortality. Qualitative data on pandemic response, quarantine measures, mitigation efforts, and official announcements will be geotagged and catalogued for theme- and location-based searches. Multilingual narrative accounts of the experience of COVID-19 in Arctic communities will be collected virtually and, with informed consent, made available on the project’s data hub.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.