Innovative UN-Habitat COVID-19 Tracking Platform Powered by CitiIQ
Measures Readiness and Response for over 1,000 Global Cities
Toronto, June 11, 2020 – CitiIQ was chosen by UN-Habitat to develop and deploy a COVID-19 Readiness and Responsiveness Tracker that covers more than 1000 cities globally. The site is now available at https://unhabitat.citiiq.com/
The world just recorded the highest number of daily COVID-19 cases to date and with more than 2,500 cities and urban areas affected, collecting data on their preparedness and response is key to ending the pandemic.
“It was an honour for CitiIQ to be selected to work with the UN-Habitat Data and Analytics team to illuminate the effect of COVID-19 for cities around the world,” said Donald E. Simmonds, the CEO of CitiIQ. “Before now, a global view of COVID-19 information at a city level has not typically been available, yet this is where the real front-line battle is fought.”
CitiIQ is best known for authoring a unique diagnostic tool for cities. It’s platform acquires city-level data for 110 different indicators creating scores out of one-hundred for 35 critical considerations of a city. The existing CitiIQ platform proved capable of adaptation to the specific needs the UN-Habitat team was looking for.
“One of the most significant challenges raised by many local city leaders remains the lack of local level data to help them respond better to the COVID-19 pandemic” said the Executive Director of UN-Habitat, Maimunah Mohd Sharif. “It is critical for leaders to be able to identify where their resources can do the greatest good and where the needs are most urgent. We offer this tracker as one of many evidence-based tools that can help local decision-making processes.”
The city-based COVID-19 Readiness and Responsiveness tracker platform uses global metrics to provide critical and often unavailable information from cities around the world. The tracker provides information that is critical for protecting populations and informing resilience and recovery strategies and future responses to global pandemics.
“This Readiness and Responsiveness tracker provides an essential insight into how cities are responding and is particularly important for urban areas that are anticipating potential outbreaks and would benefit from knowing ahead of their level of preparedness,” said Robert Ndugwa, Head of Data and Analytics for UN-Habitat.
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.
UN-Habitat’s work on developing tools and resources to support communities globally, including medical response, depends on a wide range of funders and collaborative partners.
