Collecting and encoding the measures taken against the spread of COVID2019

Contributors

Introduction

Here we collect a timeline of all containment and public health measure taken in Switzerland in the course of the COVID2019 pandemics. This is not of immediate use but we believe it will be very percious for future studies on the effect of different control strategies. We know this is boring work, but we are grateful to all contributors even if they only contributed to one or two rows of data.

Motivation

The federal council has announced the temporary closure of schools and public places non essential to daily life, ordered the cancellation of mass events and banned the gathering of more than 5 persons. These measures follow -and partially replicate at a federal level- similar measures taken earlier by local authorities and other organisations. These strict measures are considered necessary to slow the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and to mitigate the effects of COVID-2019, the disease it causes.

Measuring the effectiveness of these measures is important for multiple reasons. During the emergency, this information helps improve and quickly adapt policies and -more relevant in a political sense- is helpful to convince poplulations that it is necessary to adhere to them and that the policies are effective. Finally, over a longer timespan, these data are of scientific interest for studies in epidemology.

This evaluation rests on three types of data, all of which is actively collected at the moment:

The first pillar is data on the number of confirmed cases and on the number of performed tests, patients with severe disease progression and number of recovered patients. This is part of another challenge of this hackathon. This data can be considered the dependent variable and can be used directly (with the usual caveats regarding specificity, sensitivity, sampling bias etc.) to measure the effect of the measures.
The second pillar is auxiliary information such as data on mobility, air quality, mobile phone location data (eg https://github.com/statistikZH/monitoring_covid19/blob/master/Mobility_GooglePopularTimeGraph.md) and data on consumer behavior. This information doesn't directly correlate with case data, however it can be used to infer the adhesion of the general population to the imposed measures regardless of their disease status.
The third pillar -and the main effort spent in this project so far- is the collection of a reliable, machine readable data set on all the measures taken by authorities and organisations to slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2. This data is the independent variable -or regressor- to be used in later modeling attempt.

So far the primary outcome of the project has been a crowdsourced collection of all measures taken to slow down the spread of the virus. The data is stored in this repository.

The repository is open to contribution, contact Simone Baffelli (https://twitter.com/bafe) or Fabienne Krauer (https://twitter.com/FabiKrauer).

Data format

To collect the measures, we settled a simple (long) csv format, which can be used worldwide:

country	unit	date_implemented	date_lifted	measure	level	source	measure_cat	measure_sub_cat
the ISO code of the country where the measure is implemented	identifier of the administrative unit according to ISO_3166-2	date when the measure is implemented	date when the measure is lifted	textual description of the measure	level of the administrative unit (nation, region, city, private)	url of the source of this measure	main category of the measure	sub category of the measure

The data must be stored in long and tidy format: if multiple measures for the same entities are introduced at the same data, repeated entries must be created.

country: ISO code of the country where the measure applies.
unit: administrative unit. Whenever possible, use the ISO_3166-2 code. For cities, use full name in German, French or Italian. For measures taken by private enterprises or organisations, use their full name.
level should take one of the following values:
- national for nation-level measures
- regional for measures taken at the level of regions
- city for measures taken by municipalities
- private for measures taken by businesses, events and other organisations
date_implemented: the date when the misure first was implemented
date_lifted: the date when the measure was lifted
measure: the textual description (possibly in english) of the measure.
measure_cat and measure_sub_cat: main and sub- category of the measure according to the following codebook. If unsure, leave these fields empty.
source: paste the URL of the source so that it can be verified

Measure categorization

To fill the measure_cat and measure_sub_cat columns, we propose the following categorization, which is based on the Swiss Epidemics Act and in agreement with the categorization used by Simom Heß and Patrick Schmidt found here:

measure_cat	measure_sub_cat	note	law
case management	contact tracing		Swiss Epidemics Act, Art. 15
case management	isolation and self-isolation	Isolation at home or in care facility of cases	Swiss Epidemics Act, Art. 35b
case management	management of dead bodies		Swiss Epidemics Act, Art. 46
case management	quarantine and self-quarantine	isolation at home or in care facility of suspected cases or contacts	Swiss Epidemics Act, Art. 35a
case management	testing
economic		Including monetary or fiscal support, suspension of tax claims
mass gatherings	ban of events / mass gatherings of > 10 persons		Swiss Epidemics Act, Art. 40, 2a
mass gatherings	ban of events / mass gatherings of > 100 persons		Swiss Epidemics Act, Art. 40, 2a
mass gatherings	ban of events / mass gatherings of > 1000 persons		Swiss Epidemics Act, Art. 40, 2a
mass gatherings	ban of events / mass gatherings of > 5 persons		Swiss Epidemics Act, Art. 40, 2a
mass gatherings	ban of events / mass gatherings of > 50 persons		Swiss Epidemics Act, Art. 40, 2a
mass gatherings	ban of events / mass gatherings of > 500 persons		Swiss Epidemics Act, Art. 40, 2a
mass gatherings	event permit required		Swiss Epidemics Act, Art. 40, 2a
mobility	ban of cross-border mobility	No incoming mobility allowed	Swiss Epidemics Act, Art. 41
mobility	restriction of cross-border mobility	Incoming mobility allowed for restricted purposes (e.g. work)	Swiss Epidemics Act, Art. 41
mobility	shelter-in-place order, curfew	Prohibited to leave the house except for essential errands
mobility	stay-at-home recommendation	Strong recommendation to stay and work from home
other		Including suspension of elective surgeries or political events, establishment of information hotlines
private institution access	closure of private institutions and businesses with close contact	Including restaurants, bars, clubs, hair dressers, massage and beauty salons	Swiss Epidemics Act, Art. 40, 2b
private institution access	restriction of access to private institutions: restaurants, bars,…	Including restriction on maximum number of people or minimum distance, business hours, restriction on use of infrastructure	Swiss Epidemics Act, Art. 40, 2b
public institution access	ban of access to public open areas and parks		Swiss Epidemics Act, Art. 40, 2c
public institution access	ban of access to short- and long-term care facilites	Including hospitals, nursing homes, rehabilitation centers and disabled homes	Swiss Epidemics Act, Art. 40, 2b, Art. 19, 2d
public institution access	closure of public institutions: day care		Swiss Epidemics Act, Art. 40, 2b
public institution access	closure of public institutions: museums		Swiss Epidemics Act, Art. 40, 2b
public institution access	closure of public institutions: public offices and counters		Swiss Epidemics Act, Art. 40, 2b
public institution access	closure of public institutions: schools		Swiss Epidemics Act, Art. 40, 2b
public institution access	closure of public institutions: universities		Swiss Epidemics Act, Art. 40, 2b
public institution access	restriction of access to short- and long-term care facilites	Including hospitals, nursing homes, rehabilitation centers and disabled homes	Swiss Epidemics Act, Art. 40, 2b, Art. 19, 2d
recommendations		Including information campaigns and recommendations for hand washing, respiratory hygiene and physical distancing

TODO

General

add measures for all cantons and federal and city level measures.
code them according to general categories (Veranstaltungsverbot, ...) according to Art. 40 of the Epiemiegesetz
prepare an interactive visualization of these measures

Data collected for

How to contribute

Select an entity where data is still missing or incomplete.
Find the correspoding sheet on the collaborative Google Sheet here. If the sheet does not exist, create it.
For cantonal level, find the corresponding home page of the cantonal administration where recommendations and orders are published. These are usually published as PDF's under "media announcements / Medienmitteilungen"
Extract the information given in these published orders into the Google sheet. Use the language you are most comfortable with Extract the following information:

date_implemented: Date of implementation of the measures. Usually this is the date of the publication. If the publication just announces a future measure, do not register it yet as it is not implemented yet. Format is dd.mm.yyyy
date_lifted: Date when the control measures are lifted or undone. In most cases, you will not know this, so leave the field empty. For actions with a clear time horizon (i.e. School closure), the date_lifted can be added. However, we will have to check this continuously, since these measures are subject to change. Format is dd.mm.yyyy
measure: Free text, short description of measures taken. Look for any recommendation or action/orders issued in relation to stopping the transmission. Examples are given below.
measure_cat: category of measure. These are coded according to measures described in the Federal Pandemic law and according to the recommendations of WHO. If you are unsure about the category, leave the field empty. Use only the categories provided, do not make new categories.

mrllynn/covid-2019-measures