EPIC Tracker

The UNU Evidence, Policy, and Interventions for COVID-19 Tracker (UNU EPIC Tracker) is an inventory of the public health, economic, social and community measures taken to address COVID-19 across all countries. These measures include government policies and public sector interventions whose impacts are felt across all levels of society. A living platform, the EPIC Tracker will be regularly updated to include new policies, to reflect country responses, and to integrate other sources of data.

Methodology



Data Sources


The EPIC Tracker is an open-source platform that integrates multiple data sources:


  • Existing credible policy trackers in specific sectors (namely the WHO Health Systems Response Monitor for the European regions; the IMF Economic Response Policy Tracker; the OECD Country Policy Tracker; the Harvard Global Policy Tracker; the ICNL Civic Freedom Tracker; and more to come);
  • Crowd-sourced contributions from both experts and non-experts from across the world, engaging with academic institutions in the Global South, academic networks and communities of practice;
  • Contributions from global experts within the UNU-IIGH network, other UNU institutes and UN agencies regional and country offices to officially validate (or provide) country data.



Typology


The polices are grouped into eight sectors: Health, Education, Transport and Internal Affairs, Social Care, Economic Affairs, Labour, Justice and Rights, and Media and Information Communication Technologies (ICTs). Within sectors, the interventions are classified into sub-categories and assigned a specific tag. 


The typology of sub-categories and tags is a guide for contributors to tag interventions. The full database is searchable by sectors, tags or keywords that appear in the title and the summary of contributions.



How to Contribute


Anyone can contribute to EPIC Tracker through the 'Submit Document' button. Inputs in multiple languages will be accepted and the title and summary translated into English for global access.

The following information should be provided for each policy or intervention:


  • Country of the policy or intervention [Country]
  • Date published in the database [Date of entry]
  • Date published in the website [Date published]
  • Language of the information source [Language]
  • Title of the policy or intervention [Title]
  • Short description of the policy or intervention [Summary]
  • Date when the policy is expected to start [Start date]
  • Date when the policy is expected to end [End date]
  • Source or publisher of the information [Source]
  • Credibility score: High (governmental or other official source), Moderate (verified media source), Low (unverified media source) [Credibility]
  • Sustainable development goal(s) linked to the policy [SDGs]



Quality Control


UNU-IIGH will curate the information on the back-end for quality assurance, which includes verifying information, merging/deleting duplicates, standardising language, translations, and checking sources. The UNU-IIGH team will fill in the gaps for countries with fewer/no contributions. 



Development Timeline


The EPIC Tracker will undergo three stages of development: 


  • Phase 1 Minimum Viable Product: consists of a searchable inventory of policies, web scraping from other policy trackers, and an online form for contributors. [May 2020]

  • Phase 2 Visualisations and classification: includes interactive visualisations of number of policies per country and sector, policy types and a timeline, and automated classification of sub-categories and tags. [July 2020] 

  • Phase 3 Integration with other data sources: involves data linkages with  sources such as SDG indicators , national surveys, citizen-generated data, and big data for impact assessment studies. [September 2020] 


Contribute!

Sign up here and start contributing documents to this database