Redlands-based Esri offers new high tech tool in the fight against Covid-19
The new application is called "Covid Pulse".
It's an interactive, map-based visual display, which tracks coronavirus case information at the national, state, and county level.
The company behind it is Esri.
Headquartered in Redlands, the company is a global player in GiS, or geographic information systems.
"I feel like I can get the pulse of the country with regard to Covid-19 just immediately," said Dr. Este Geraghty, Esri's Chief Medical Officer.
Geraghty says the application, launched Tuesday, allows decision makers at all levels to see what is happening with Covid-19 around the country.
Every state and county is represented with a "spark line" which shows trends in each location for "new cases per capita", "deaths per capita", and "cumulative cases".
"You can look at the pandemic from the beginning in the U.S. to the current day and this is updated daily," said Geraghty.
The trend in each location is also categorized as "emergent", "spreading", "epidemic", "controlled" or "end stage".
For Riverside County, with 1,953 new cases and 48 deaths in the past 7 days, the trend remains "epidemic".
Esri is the same company whose technology is being used to power the now widely recognized Johns Hopkins Covid-19 dashboard, which is being used to track case information around the world.
The Johns Hopkins dashboard provides more of a snapshot view of data at a point in time.
Covid Pulse provides a visual display over time, allowing users to identify spikes in cases related to specific events.
For example, a graph for Orange County North Carolina shows a spike in the number of Covid cases in mid-August, which correlates directly with students returning to UNC Chapel Hill for the start of the fall semester.
Geraghty says such information could help policy makers make better decisions.
"I don't know of any other tool where decision makers have so much information available to them in a singe glance so they can get that high level data," said Geraghty.
Covid Pulse is currently available for use only in the United States.
The URL for the application can be accessed using a browser on a desktop or mobile device.
