[Feature] What sort of data would you like from a provincial government?

[riazarbi]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. If, hypothetically, a provincial government was open to sharing more data with the public with the aim of building public confidence and promoting a more cohesive public response -

1. What sort of data would it be useful to share
2. What dissemination methods would maximize the chances of a meaningful impact?

We're all numerically and technically literate, talk of APIs and buckets and confidence intervals is fine.

Describe the solution you'd like I'd like to extract a well structured list of valuable datasets that a provincial government is able to provide, along with arguments for why sharing them would be in the public good and suggestions for how to disseminate.

Describe alternatives you've considered The current status quo, which is an amazing amount of work from dedicated volunteers around this repo - but quite inefficient.

Additional context I'd like to stress this is just me, in my personal capacity, soliciting opinions from other individuals in their personal capacity.

[webdevan]

I'm no scientist but I'll give my 2 cents.

The withholding of data is bad and I think all data should be made available as much and as quickly as possible to enable independent research.

For Covid-19 deaths it would be good to know some specifics like age, sex, co-morbidity - to help determine who are most susceptible.

We are getting some numbers (eg positive cases) per district but it would be good to also get the number of tests done per district - to make those numbers more meaningful.

Perhaps numbers of ICU beds empty vs beds in use per hospital/district could be useful - to help with logistics.

I like looking at patterns in numbers so I would be very interested to see the rates of suicide, murder, domestic abuse, mental health diagnosis, drug related crimes, etc - to see how these have been impacted by the lockdown.

On a personal note, it would also be cool to have the approximate time and geo-location for every test (or positive test) so that I can create some data visualizations.

[riazarbi]

Thanks @webdevan this is useful.

We all feel the pain of the data vacuum - this repo is indispensable even to parts of govt that don't have a direct line to the DoH.

A balance needs to be struck between data transparency (which I advocate) and patient confidentiality. It's also important to make sure one doesn't cause panic with the sort of data being released. For instance a real time feed of bed capacity could result in sick people swamping hospitals that have more beds, which would make the situation worse.

I'll definitely take your suggestions on board and forward them on.

[riazarbi]

I like looking at patterns in numbers so I would be very interested to see the rates of suicide, murder, domestic abuse, mental health diagnosis, drug related crimes, etc - to see how these have been impacted by the lockdown.

On this, for Cape Town at least, there is the Service Request datasets. These are geolocated timeseries of all the service requests (blocked sewers, lights out etc - not crimes which are confidential) that the City receives. It would be interesting to analyse how these have been impacted by the crisis. Are there less issues being reported? Is local govt more or less effective at service delivery during the crisis? Do they take shorter or longer to respond to a request? Are there areas of the City which are better served than others?

The latest data is till Jan 2020 but maybe we can get it updated at end April if there is interest.

http://odp.capetown.gov.za/datasets/service-requests

I've got an ulterior motive here - if you come up with anything interesting share back the code and I'll make an internal report!

[frikkieventer]

Can you include the number of covid 19 tests being conducted per province in the dashboard please

[vukosim]

Can we go for this?

Vukosi

http://www.vima.co.za http://www.twitter.com/vukosi

On Sun, 19 Apr 2020, 22:47 Riaz Arbi, notifications@github.com wrote:

I like looking at patterns in numbers so I would be very interested to see the rates of suicide, murder, domestic abuse, mental health diagnosis, drug related crimes, etc - to see how these have been impacted by the lockdown.

On this, for Cape Town at least, there is the Service Request datasets. These are geolocated timeseries of all the service requests (blocked sewers, lights out etc - not crimes which are confidential) that the City receives. It would be interesting to analyse how these have been impacted by the crisis. Are there less issues being reported? Is local govt more or less effective at service delivery during the crisis? Do they take shorter or longer to respond to a request? Are there areas of the City which are better served than others?

The latest data is till Jan 2020 but maybe we can get it updated at end April if there is interest.

http://odp.capetown.gov.za/datasets/service-requests

I've got an ulterior motive here - if you come up with anything interesting share back the code and I'll make an internal report!

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[riazarbi]

Ok, WC gov has a corona website up here -https://www.westerncape.gov.za/department-of-health/coronavirus . Not sure if it has been posted before. Winde committed to getting a dashboard up by end of week in the bottom of this press statement - https://www.westerncape.gov.za/department-of-health/news/coronavirus-update-premier-alan-winde-21-april . Not sure if it will be machine readable.

[vukosim]

@riazarbi that website is being used to update the district data.

[JemLukeBingham]

Very valuable would be the numbers of people screened by community health workers (with as much spacial resolution as possible) and a breakdown, among those tested, of the reasons for testing (contact tracing, community health worker screening, or presenting at hospital with symptoms). This would be invaluable for making sense of other data streams.

[riazarbi]

@vukosim im going to leave this issue open so that I can point public health officials to it as evidence of what the community wants. But if you want to close it feel free - it’s your repo.

@JemLukeBingham i’ll make sure to mention that whenever I get the chance.