5 Quick Wins for Cities Response to COVID-19
At Delivery Associates Digital we are currently working to support US cities with their COVID-19 response. Beneath I enumerate 5 Quick Wins, which use open-source tools that have been high impact in our work. I hope these will be useful to others working with cities in the US and elsewhere.
The focus here is on a smaller US cities with population sizes of <250K and limited budgets.
1 — Real-time data collection
Automated scripts powered by R, example here. Save hours of much needed time by city officials, and pull in data in real-time from sources. Rather than having city officials spend time scraping data. This will support data driven decision making.
Time to build: < 5 hours
Time saved: 25% of a ‘key persons time’
2 — Data viz and analysis
Shinyapps to build dashboards for COVID-19 policy and city response. Including, assessing the impact of interventions on equity, here is an example.
Time to build: < 5 hours
3 — Share and communicate ‘best practices’
Airtable to share practices and interventions. This will support innovation.
Time to build: < 1 hour
4 — Communication & transparency
Squarespace or Webflow to build sites, which communicate COVID-19 data and information. This can be part of a comms push using SMS and social media. See here a good toolkit from the CDC. This will support city outreach and ensure people get ‘trusted’ guidance.
Time to build: < 1 hour
5 — Build good relationships at data sources
Building good relationships at primary data sources is key. Data can only be as good as the quality of it’s collection e.g. at the County Health department level.
Conclusion
Short term quick-wins can generate impact and build trust. They are solid stepping stones using open-source tools to longer-term product road-maps.
The team and I stand ready to assist any city, state, local and national agencies in what is the world’s most critical public health effort — feel free to reach out to us digital@deliveryassociates.com.
