Visual analytics of COVID-19 dissemination in São Paulo state, Brazil
This work addresses the need for decision-makers to understand disease progression in a specific region, but it is incremental as it applies existing visual analytics techniques to COVID-19 data.
The authors tackled the problem of monitoring COVID-19 dissemination by proposing a new visual analytics tool that uses k-nearest neighbors to compare cities and assess isolation policies, validating it with data from São Paulo state, Brazil.
Visual analytics techniques are useful tools to support decision-making and cope with increasing data, which is particularly important when monitoring natural or artificial phenomena. When monitoring disease progression, visual analytics approaches help decision-makers choose to understand or even prevent dissemination paths. In this paper, we propose a new visual analytics tool for monitoring COVID-19 dissemination. We use k-nearest neighbors of cities to mimic neighboring cities and analyze COVID-19 dissemination based on the comparison of a city under consideration and its neighborhood. Moreover, such analysis is performed based on periods, which facilitates the assessment of isolation policies. We validate our tool by analyzing the progression of COVID-19 in neighboring cities of São Paulo state, Brazil.