UP launches site mapping coronavirus cases

MANILA - The University of the Philippines (UP) said Thursday it had created a website to provide the public with vital information for fighting the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

The site, endcov.ph, tracks the spread of the novel coronavirus to also help authorities combat the disease, its team leader Dr. Mahar Lagmay said.

"We want to expose the invisible enemy through technology... When I say expose, we want to track the occurrences, see how it spreads and we can only do that if we have real-time information," he told ANC.

"In this war against COVID-19, we really have to be faster on how COVID-19 works," added Lagmay, executive director of UP Resilience Institute.

The website features a highly detailed map, wherein users can see street or satellite views of the general locations and numbers of COVID-19 cases, hospitals, quarantine checkpoints and other data.

The easy-to-use site also has a color-coded “heat map” showing which localized areas have the most and the least number of confirmed COVID-19 cases.

Other pages of the website show COVID-19-related policies, advisories, resources, statistical data, and profiles of patients who have been investigated, tested, admitted and treated in hospitals, including those who have died and those who have recovered from the disease.

Lagmay said the website was created in support of the government's ongoing efforts to address the COVID-19 pandemic.

Experts on public health, medicine, the arts and sciences, engineering, education, governance and related fields formed part of the team.

Since launching the site, Lagmay said they had been invited by the technical working group of the Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) on making suggestions on how to tackle the crisis.

As of Thursday, the Philippines has recorded 2,633 coronavirus cases, with 107 deaths and 51 recoveries.