Ten GIS-Based Solutions for Managing and Controlling COVID-19 Pandemic Outbreak

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has caused disastrous results in most countries of the world. It has rapidly spread across the globe with over 156 million cumulative confirmed cases and 3.264 million deaths to date, according to World Health Organization (WHO) Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Dashboard. With these huge amounts of causalities in the world, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as a computer-based analyzer could help governments, experts, medical staff, and citizens to prevent and respond to the incidence. On the other hand, the COVID-19 pandemic involves many unknown parameters where most of them have a spatial dimension. Thus, spatial analysis and GIS could provide appropriate decision-making tools, predictive models, statistical methods, and new technologies for COVID-19 outbreak control, also help the people for avoiding direct contact and preserving social distance. This article aims to review the most promising categories of GIS-based solutions in this domain. We divided the solutions into ten classes including spatio-temporal analysis, SDSS approaches, geo-business, context-aware recommendation systems, participatory GIS and volunteered geographic information (VGI), internet of things (IoT), location-based service (LBS), web mapping, satellite imagery-based analysis, and waste management. The main contribution of this paper is proposing different geospatial guidelines that could provide reliable and useful protocols for COVID-19 outbreak control to minimize causalities, restrict incidence, establish effective urban communication, provide new approaches for business in lockdown situations, telehealth treatment, patient monitoring, adaptive decision making, and visualize trend analysis.