COVID-19 Resource Hub

Project Description

Involved in COVID-19 with the World Health Organization right from the start, and familiar with public health and emergencies, I was able to forecast a number of issues early on. These were:

1. Government, Health and Technical/Professional fields in general, don't traditionally have the strongest success communicating. They have a tendency to focus on technical information and facts. Whilst these things are obviously important, they are often irrelevant to persuasive communication.
2. On top of this there are many communities and sub-communities in countries susceptible to creating and perpetuating misinformation. For some groups this is intentional, for others it is not. Not adequately addressing these dynamics can pose significant threats during any prolonged emergency.
3. Connected to all of this was a significant knowledge gap between the general public, experts, government and the media. The ability for a society to effectively navigate COVID-19 smoothly was always going to be limited by the strength of these four areas. Effective education was required to quickly build capacity in each of these domains, particularly for journalists required to report on unfolding events.

Contacting a number of government officials, WHO staff, influential health associations and media contacts early on, I was unable to find a champion to resource me to address these concerns. So after work hours, I set out to build an online platform to experiment with how these points could be addressed during a pandemic.

The platform was a huge success. The dashboard communicated data in a way that was different to other places at the time. Rather than just tracking cases it sought to educate through the data it communicated. This meant highlighting hospitalisation rates, pressure on ICU's, and age demographics the disease was moving through and how this effected the crude fatality ratio. These dashboards attracted thousands of users per day during spikes and became commonly referred to by other sites.

Alongside the dashboards I wrote a number of pages explaining why COVID-19 was such a big deal. This was an experiment at educating the general public whilst also targeting online misinformation. It provided an opportunity to test some of my own theories about what would and wouldn't be persuasive to various sub-communities. The pages were designed to:

• Decrease the likelihood those susceptible to misinformation would become infected by conspiracies
• Provide resources to those already resilient to conspiracies to help them strengthen their own networks
• Provide data on misinformation groups by using a variety of trackers to analyse how these groups interacted with these pages

The feedback from these pages was strong with a number of influential academics and civil servants linking to the site through Twitter.

Whilst I had hoped that the traction and traffic the site generated may have lead to government support to expand it further, this did not eventuate and the effort to maintain it became less of a priority.

Nonetheless it was a fun project enabling me to test some of my own theories and collect a host of learnings through the experience.