We built an approach to simulate the effect of different public health interventions against the spread of COVID-19. Although created for the Cox’s Bazar refugee settlement in Bangladesh, the model is designed to be generalizable to other settings.
The results are helping professionals in Cox’s Bazar settlement make faster and more informed decisions.
Located in Bangladesh, the Cox’s Bazar settlement houses the Kutupalong-Balukhali Expansion Site, a collection of camps for refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) which form the most densely populated and interconnected site with almost 600,000 Rohingya refugees. Measures that proved effective in slowing down the spread of the virus, including social distancing and household quarantine, are not always possible or easy to implement here.
Our team worked with public health professionals, data scientists, and academics spanning multiple UN agencies and universities to model the impact of various public health operational interventions in the site.
The team looked at various scenarios that could support more effective and efficient decision-making and advocacy.
We explored the different possibilities for reopening learning centers, which are vital to the community and which were closed in March 2020.
“PulseSatellite is an exciting example of a system combining AI and human experience to greatly improve the use of satellite imagery in the UN system. By employing artificial intelligence and a great and intuitive interface, the power of satellite imagery is much more accessible to UN colleagues.
“PulseSatellite is a promising tool that will allow UN agencies to use their own models while including the analyst during on-the-fly training and evaluation. It will also help to scale the deployment phase providing a user-friendly interface.”
“We wanted to build a web-based tool that is tailored to the needs of UN agencies and that is easy to use. The collaborative nature of the system is what hopefully makes it invaluable, both because it allows teams across time zones and geographies to work on the same project, and because it encourages teams to upload and use their own models, as well as share them with others.
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