Although the E2mC project ended last year in April 2019, some of its results and components are still used today, namely in the fight against COVID-19. Near real-time monitoring of COVID-19 is of utmost importance for emergency organisations and authorities that need to re-evaluate the situation continuously based on the latest available information. One key component of E2mC, developed by the University of Salzburg's Department of Geoinformatics - Z_GIS (https://giscience.zgis.at), provides information extracted from social media (predominantly Twitter) to enable better crisis management for various organisations such as the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), and others. The generated information includes time-series of COVID-19 related tweets, the spatially clustered tweets on a hot spot map, and the most recent COVID-19 related tweets in the respective areas of interest, together with linked content like images or videos. These results are regularly sent to and discussed with the emergency organisations to help them get a quick and continuous overview of the COVID-19 situation through the lens of social media - both in a big picture (hot spot maps) and small-scale developments derived from single tweets. Meanwhile, the results are a fixed part of the work of several crisis management teams, supporting real-world decisions through high-frequency information updates.
more maps and information at https://giscience.zgis.at/covid-19