Researchers from RBCDSAI, IIT Madras have been working on several timely projects to model the infection spread and analyse other COVID-19 related data. In particular, RBCDSAI partnered with Facebook Data For Good and gained access to anonymized movement data of Facebook users. We also utilized open-sourced COVID-19 cases database offered by covid19india.org. Using that, our team of data scientists are creating visualizations, building epidemiological models and creating situation reports. We are closely working with public health officials, regularly sharing situation reports with them.

Some of the key insights we found are: a) there exists a strong correlation between regions showing high mobility and regions that are most affected by the virus, b) the mobility has been increasing with each stage of lockdown and c) there is a huge difference in how people move during weekdays and weekends. Factoring such insights while building diffusion models for the infection can help us in deriving a more accurate progression curve for the disease and reveal key factors that can be used to curb the infection spread.

Our work was also recently featured in the press.