COVINFORM - Technical Report & Database - Update

The COVINFORM project investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic across the 27 EU member states (MS) and the UK. National, regional, and local responses varied in success due to the changeable nature of the public health crisis and the level of preparedness and adaptability of governing institutions. Whilst the general population in the EU and UK experienced disruptive and life changing consequences, the impacts were not equally experienced, and notable differences were evidenced in certain social clusters. In the COVINFORM project we pay particular focus on those vulnerable and marginalised groups. One of the projects outputs includes an interactive risk assessment dashboard that centres on various types of vulnerability (i.e., physical, social, economic and information) and the related consequences, within the context of COVID-19. Extensive work was undertaken to appropriately define the risk assessment framework, this provides a risk score for MS and the UK and is visualised on the risk assessment dashboard. This included engagement with all project stakeholders to inform the various types of indicators that are best used to quantitatively represent key domains, such as social vulnerability, within the context of COVID-19. This was after a review of the literature and finally the identification of such data routinely collected in the EU and UK. Following data collection, the secondary data were preprocessed for in-depth modelling that will provide insights for various stakeholders (e.g., policy makers, first responders and researchers). For example, the contribution of certain features of vulnerability which are highly correlated to the consequences of COVID-19, such as poorer physical health or dependency on social supports. These insights will offer stakeholders the opportunity to explore their assumptions of risk, particularly for vulnerable groups, during public health crisis and ultimately inform their future responses.

This report provides an update of the technical work undertaken in the development of the risk assessment model and the interactive dashboard. The first iteration of this report was submitted in M20 (June 2022), D2.3 ‘Technical Report’. In addition, this report provides an update of the COVINFORM database which contains both primary and secondary data sources. This provides an update of D2.1, ‘Database containing different data sources’, submitted in M10 (August 2021). This report includes information regarding activities relating to the collection and processing of national level quantitative data across the EU27 MS and the UK. This data is supplemented with COVINFORM qualitative case study data from the ten COVINFORM target countries (Austria, Belgium, England, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Wales). This primary data allows for consideration of the impacts and response of COVID-19 on vulnerable groups as defined by the case
studies. A detailed overview of the indicators and data sources integrated into the risk model under the domains of threat, vulnerability, consequences, and resilience are also included in the Annex of this report. In addition, we describe the process followed to download, clean, and reformat data before ingestion into our risk model. We also describe how the risk framework is mapped to our modelling procedure, as well as provide technical details of this modelling and how we compute countries' preliminary risk scores. We also present a summary overview of the interactive dashboard’s implementation, encompassing details about its features, design methodology, deployment procedures and accessibility considerations. Additionally, we provide illustrative screenshots of each tab, highlighting their distinct functionalities.