International Journal of Digital Earth (Oct 2020)

Taking the pulse of COVID-19: a spatiotemporal perspective

  • Chaowei Yang,
  • Dexuan Sha,
  • Qian Liu,
  • Yun Li,
  • Hai Lan,
  • Weihe Wendy Guan,
  • Tao Hu,
  • Zhenlong Li,
  • Zhiran Zhang,
  • John Hoot Thompson,
  • Zifu Wang,
  • David Wong,
  • Shiyang Ruan,
  • Manzhu Yu,
  • Douglas Richardson,
  • Luyao Zhang,
  • Ruizhi Hou,
  • You Zhou,
  • Cheng Zhong,
  • Yifei Tian,
  • Fayez Beaini,
  • Kyla Carte,
  • Colin Flynn,
  • Wei Liu,
  • Dieter Pfoser,
  • Shuming Bao,
  • Mei Li,
  • Haoyuan Zhang,
  • Chunbo Liu,
  • Jie Jiang,
  • Shihong Du,
  • Liang Zhao,
  • Mingyue Lu,
  • Lin Li,
  • Huan Zhou,
  • Andrew Ding

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/17538947.2020.1809723
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 13, no. 10
pp. 1186 – 1211

Abstract

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The sudden outbreak of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) swept across the world in early 2020, triggering the lockdowns of several billion people across many countries, including China, Spain, India, the U.K., Italy, France, Germany, Brazil, Russia, and the U.S. The transmission of the virus accelerated rapidly with the most confirmed cases in the U.S., India, Russia, and Brazil. In response to this national and global emergency, the NSF Spatiotemporal Innovation Center brought together a taskforce of international researchers and assembled implementation strategies to rapidly respond to this crisis, for supporting research, saving lives, and protecting the health of global citizens. This perspective paper presents our collective view on the global health emergency and our effort in collecting, analyzing, and sharing relevant data on global policy and government responses, human mobility, environmental impact, socioeconomical impact; in developing research capabilities and mitigation measures with global scientists, promoting collaborative research on outbreak dynamics, and reflecting on the dynamic responses from human societies.

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