Team Name

Team 1495

Team Members

Project Description

Problem:

Living in a Post-Covid world is inevitable. Technology has played a pivotal role in fighting the virus from day to day, as well as for governments to make decisions. To re-open the world we have to innovate in the way we use vast amounts of information and technology. Currently we have information from governments that we rely on the most, mainstream news and social media. People spend a major part of the day trying to put them together to make sense of them all. For example, when lockdown is imminent, it is not always clear where to go to get facts right. There are rumors, hesitant governments, and misinformation.

Solution

We have created a website where you can see timely information from verified sources. A map with the locations of interest in Australia and New Zealand and the number of Covid-positive cases gives a general outlook of cases. Clicking on the hotspots brings up any alerts on that location. You can also view Covid-19 testing centers and vaccination centers. This simple to use format ensures that the user has a reliable place to go to for accurate information. Users can zoom into areas to get location-specific information. For governments, this potentially means that they provide real-time information and can spend less time mitigating the response for new cases.

Future updates:

• Relevant social media updates to scroll through
• Display which shops are currently open, including alerts (reduced hours, etc), and advertise contactless delivery options
• Additional displays and filters on the map
• Integrate with additional data sets
• Check your on location history (from Google's data) to alert you if you were a location of interest
• To overcome privacy issues, this would be opt-in and has to be manually exported from google and imported into the frontend of the application. This information won't hit the backend of the application and cannot be shared with anyone.

Data Story

Behind the scenes we utilise data from numerous sources.

• Using Confluent cloud we are able to subscribe to locations of interest throughout Australia and get updates in real time.

• Using a dataset from the Ministry of Health NZ we can pull the current NZ locations of interest.

• Using datasets discovered through data.gov.au we can display testing locations and vaccinations sites for a few states/territories.

• Using datasets from Healthpoint we can display testing locations and vaccinations sites throughout NZ.

Note: The site may take some time to load, as Heroku puts the application to sleep if unused for too long.

Due to limitations of the free tier of Heroku, that data currently doesn't update over time. But this can be configured and manually executed in the short term.