Readiness and response to Covid-19 crisis: how well have cities reacted?

The Covid-19 pandemic is highly affecting cities because population density favors virus diffusion. Cities are reinventing themselves in order to minimize chances of contagion while staying alive and functioning. A recently released UN-HABITAT platform evaluates how well cities have responded to and coped with the crisis, constituting an informative base for assessing containment efforts and designing upcoming urban policies.

“The web-based visual platform provides scoring for over 1,000 cities including, where data is available, cities with a population of 500,000 or higher along with country capitals and state/provincial capitals for the USA, Brazil, India, and China and allows for the addition of cities as data becomes available.

The COVID-19 Readiness and Responsiveness tracker for cities is a unique scoring mechanism that integrates a range of data points to provide a COVID-19 Readiness Score and a COVID-19 Responsiveness Score on a scale of 0-100.

The Readiness Score is based on five core indicator areas: public health capacity, societal strength, economic ability, infrastructure, and national collaborative will. Meanwhile the Responsiveness Score is based on: spread response, treatment response, economic response and supply chain response. The input data is normalized to provide comparison between cities.

The tracker, available at https://unhabitat.citiiq.com/ is powered by the CitiIQ platform which is capable of sourcing, translating and communicating both the Readiness and Responsiveness scores of cities.”

What do you think of this visualization tool? What dynamics does it help to illuminate? What other sources might be integrated into score measurement? Have a good exploration!

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