Geospatial Analysis of Covid-19 to Respond to Pandemic Outbreaks: A Case Study in Bangkok Metropolitan Region, Thailand

Abstract

Coronavirus (Covid-19) has to date (March 29th 2020) infected over 81,000 Chinese citizens, mostly in Hubei Province, since it was first identified in December 2019. It has so far spread to more than 202 countries. On the 31th of March 2020, the total number of laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 cases reported by Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) in Thailand is 1524, of which 127 have recovered, 1388 are receiving treatment (17 cases are severe) in healthcare settings and nine have died. Recently Geographic Information System (GIS) provide epidemiologists and public health officers in the surveillance, monitoring and controlling of many infected diseases such as vector-borne diseases or human-to-human transmission diseases in many countries. Particularly it can provide the functions of collecting, updating and managing disease surveillance and related data, such as geographical factor and socio-economic. They are also pertinent to suit the needs of understanding the spatial spread or diffusion of disease outbreak and response for designing the prevention and control strategies. The major objective of this research is to apply the spatial epidemiology approaches for studying COVID-19 patterns and hotspots in Bangkok Metropolitan Region (BMR), Thailand. The specific objectives are to analyze the COVID-19 patterns in the terms of population and geographic distribution patterns; to detect the COVID-19 incidence rate under different months by using the spatial analysis. This research provides maps to view the pandemic situation of BMR and the provincial level of COVID-19 in particular heat maps and ring maps.