Infrastructure for spatiotemporal exploration of interregional and international interaction of epidemiological data

The recent waves of COVID-19 highlighted the importance of understanding and quantifying spatiotemporal interactions to infer, model, and predict disease spread in real time. In this demonstration paper, we present a robust infrastructure for interactive exploration of interregional and international spatiotemporal interactions via time-lagged correlations of increases in COVID-19 incidence. This infrastructure consists of: (i) an operational data store (ODS) coupled with automated scripts for downloading, cleaning, and processing data from heterogeneous sources; (ii) a server application handling on-demand analyses of the database data through a RESTful API; and (iii) a web application providing the interactive dashboard to explore various correlation and geostatistical metrics of the integrated data in spacetime. The environment allows users to study focal spatiotemporal trends and the potential of regions to export and import the virus. Moreover, the application has the potential to reveal the effect of the national border to mitigate the interaction, particularly the spread of the virus. The infrastructure serves COVID-19 data from Germany, Poland, and Czechia, with the possibility of extension to other regions and topics. The dashboard is under active development and accessible on www.where2test.de/correlation.