Amid lockdown, Odisha sees ‘traffic’ from 123 countries
In the three and a half months since it went live, Odisha’s Covid dashboard has become an invaluable resource for public health experts wanting to access and analyse verified data on the disease. But it’s not just policy-makers who visit the visually striking dashboard every day. Hungry for information, people from across the world rely on it for up-to-date data.
The dashboard, accessible in both English and Odia, is run by a team of around 10 people from the Odisha Computer Application Centre, which functions under the state IT department. It went live on April 22, when the state had around 90 cases. One of the best government-run Covid dashboards in the country, it has seen traffic from 123 countries, especially India, USA, the Netherlands, UAE and UK. With an average of 40,000 hits per day, the dashboard has played a large part in Odisha ranking third among states in Covid data reporting, according to a recent study by researchers at Stanford University.
“For the layperson, the dashboard is a one stop for all Covid data released by Odisha. It played a big role in the Covid data reporting score we assigned to the state,” Varun Vasudevan and Abeynaya Gnanasekaran, authors of the Stanford study ‘Disparity in the quality of Covid-19 data reporting across India’, told TOI over email.
“We started the dashboard to understand the data we were getting. One reason it became so popular was because there were hardly any other sources of data available then,” said Manoj Kumar Mishra, state secretary (electronics & IT).
Since it went live, the dashboard has added more data and improved data visualisation. The numbers are sourced from government agencies, especially the health department. When the dashboard began carrying details of returning migrants, the transport department was roped in as well. “Initially it would be updated every three days. As the data flow became smoother, we began updating it every 24 hours,” Mishra said.
The Odisha Covid dashboard began recording daily infections, active cases, recoveries and deaths. Based on user feedback, it complemented this with standard bar chart of daily new cases and graph of cumulative cases. In May, it added a time-lapse graph on the day-wise progression of Covid cases in the districts. This was followed by age-wise and gender-wise summary of patients. “To increase granularity of data on the dashboard, we plan to include block-level testing data very soon,” the IT secretary added.
While public health experts have long banked on tackling diseases with data, the current pandemic is arguably the first in which ordinary people have sought out and consumed data in such volumes. “Each of us has been affected by the pandemic. It is natural for us to consume data on it,” the Stanford researchers said.
Buoyed by the response received for its Covid dashboard, Odisha plans to expand the concept of ‘decision-making through data’. In a year or so, it will launch a more ambitious dashboard, comprising data on around 30 verticals including the state’s flagship schemes. Also on the cards is an e-employment exchange, which will connect job-seekers to employers. The Stanford authors, too, said they were optimistic that some governments would widen the use of dashboards to other areas.
“State governments can maintain a TB dashboard as eradication of the disease by 2030 is a sustainable development goal,” they said.
How much does it cost to maintain a dashboard? Not very much at all, said Mishra. “A dashboard costs the same as any other website. What makes it stand out is the domain knowledge of the creators. Quality doesn’t take money,” he added.