Next Pandemic Preparedness: A Focus on Health Data Standardization and Readiness for Spatial Enablement

Within the EU H2020 PERISCOPE Project (Pan-European Response to the Impacts of COvid-19 and future Pandemics and Epidemics), the authors have dealt with several data sources related to the COVID pandemic, focused on health, socioeconomics, and policies. In the present paper, some lessons learned are presented, focused on the ECDC (European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control) repository and, more precisely, on the spatial enablement of the COVID-related data. The paper illustrates the inconsistencies the authors found, and the strategies depicted to fix them. The paper also proposes some modification to the ECDC repository, to make its data easier and quicker to integrate and analyze. Finally, some graphs are shown, highlighting how interesting and powerful the full integration of the whole ECDC Covid-related archive can be.