GIS and Geo-Positioning Developments in Coping With the Pandemic

This chapter deals with some technical aspects of the spatial strategy for overcoming the huge challenges posed by the pandemic. The focus of this chapter is to highlight the use of GIS tools and positioning technologies in diverse contexts to manage the threat of COVID-19. For this task, three stages of analysis are proposed. In a first preventive stage, some governments applied socioeconomic criteria drawn from existent statistical information to spatially identify the areas with a clear predisposition toward the accelerated spread of the contagion. In a second stage, when the pandemic fully reached a rapid pace of expansion and lockdown measures became necessary, the technologies helped to monitor the most affected areas and to establish a dashboard deployment for visualizing the severity of the catastrophe. In the third stage, after the establishment of control and mobility protocols, different governments resorted to mobile phone positioning as a resource for monitoring quarantine compliance and recognizing if social group behavior entailed any evident risk or spread.