Developing a Data Integrated COVID-19 Tracking System
for Decision-Making and Public Use

For more details about COVID-19 and our efforts, please see our published work.

About COVID-19

Coronavirus disease or COVID-19 is respiratory disease, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) virus. Symptoms may appear up to 14 days after infection. For those individuals infected with COVID-19, symptom severity can range from mild to severe. Common symptoms include cough, fever, difficulty breathing and pneumonia. The vast majority of people who experience COVID-19 will recover from it, although a few vulnerable groups (including the elderly and those with pre-existing medical conditions) are more likely to develop a serious illness.

On the 30th of January 2020, the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a Public Health Emergency of "International Concern", and was classified as a pandemic on the 11th of March 2020.

Our Goals

The Cumming School of Medicine (CSM) at the University of Calgary has quickly responded to this pandemic, by prioritizing and accelerating research to develop countermeasures needed to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. CSM turned to the experts at the Centre for Health Informatics (CHI) to spearhead the development of a surveillance tool.

Our experts at CHI (data scientists, academics, clinicians, statisticians, epidemiologists, and visualization specialists) teamed up and developed an interactive and comprehensible dashboard. We want to help all Albertans and Canadians stay informed on the current COVID-19 situation, with the best data that is available.

"What does the current COVID-19 crisis look like across provinces?"
"How is Canada doing compared to other countries?"
"Are policy changes making a difference in 'flattening the curve'?"

We aim to help shed light on some of these commonly asked questions, and more.

Given the urgency of the situation, we have opted to share our work in progress. Please consider it as such.

The Data

As a reader of this dashboard, we (the creators at CHI) please ask you to consider the following information before interpreting our results.

To develop the following graphics, we used publicly available data from the COVID-19 Canada Open Data Working Group¹, Johns Hopkins University², StatsCanada³, the Government of Canada⁴, Covid Canada Spreadsheet⁵ and Alberta Health⁶. Most of the data used to create the Canadian graphics are from the Canada Open Data Working Group, which is updated every working day. At most, the data presented is less than 24 hours behind. British Columbia has been reporting case numbers for the weekend and holidays on the following day since the start of the pandemic. Alberta also started this practice on July 6th. This creates two days of 0 cases, and 1 day of an increased case count. To counteract this, we split the cases evenly between all of the days.

The current COVID-19 situation is rapidly evolving, and these sources of data did not necessarily agree. Like other surveillance platforms, we are using the best data that we have access to, and are continually striving to obtain the best data available.

The data presented below are based on confirmed cases only (individuals with laboratory confirmed infection). Actual cases are likely severely underestimated at this point in time, as suspected cases (test results not yet confirmed) and “people of interest” (those that have not been tested or reported) are not included in case counts.

Similarly, the number of cases detected is dependent on the number of people tested. As a result, data that is reported is biased, and over-representative of those at greater risk of disease (for example, older demographics, healthcare workers, those that have recently traveled) than the general population.