The Esri Canada Monkeypox Tracker
When it comes to public health events of concern, Esri Canada believes in providing open access to relevant and up-to-date information. The Esri Canada Monkeypox Tracker is a map visualization of open data published by Global.Health – a Data Science Initiative.
Click here to view the Esri Canada Monkeypox Tracker in a new window
The tracker is not intended to raise alarm given that sustained transmission is not expected to occur within the general population, nor does it pose any significant health risks to the general population compared to SARS-CoV-2. Current evidence suggests that transmission of the virus from someone who has no symptoms (asymptomatic spread) is extremely uncommon (Health Canada 2022).
The tracker is intended to provide global situational awareness of the worldwide monkeypox epidemic to inform public health stakeholders, the media, the public, and most importantly, populations who may be at greater risk of exposure to monkeypox.
Monkeypox is caused by the monkeypox virus, a member of the same family of viruses as smallpox, although it is much less severe. Monkeypox is usually a mild illness and most people recover on their own after a few weeks (CDC 2022). However, in rare circumstances people may become very sick and death may occur. In Canada, provinces and territories have publicly reported 112 cases of monkeypox as of June 10, 2022 at 11:00 am EDT (Health Canada 2022).
For more information about monkeypox, please review the following links:
Brian Mosley, our Health Solutions Lead, and Kieran Petrasek, our Health Geography Lead, identified the need to visualize global reported monkeypox cases on a map. They chose to build a simple map dashboard using ArcGIS Online, leveraging open data collected by the global.health team.
For more information about Esri Canada’s Public Health program, please reach out to publichealth@esri.ca or view our webpage at www.esri.ca/health.
This post was translated to French and can be viewed here.