Impact of COVID-19 on Food Security

This award will expand the current scope and focus of USAID funding of the Rutgers Policy Consortium with the following activities. 1. The GASSP system will be rewritten to account for changes in available data. Specifically, we will rewrite the surveillance and disease modeling code in R and translate that script into python to automatically update the data we pull down using APIs. 2. Currently, we only calculate COVID-19 surveillance and disease modeling for COVID-19 at the national level. Due to their large populations, low vaccination rates and probability of spinning off new variants, we will commence to conducting surveillance and disease modeling at the subnational level for the countries of India, Brazil, and Nigeria. 3. We will collect and post data for 200 countries on vaccination rates, % of population partially vaccinated and % of population fully vaccinated plus at the subnational level for countries specified above. 4. To better respond to USAID needs, we will build out a dashboard for COVID-19 Facts and questions for use by USAID bureaus, missions, and membership countries. These will also be available for the general public consumption. 5. We will examine how water insecurity relates to COVID-19 and food insecurity at the national level by country.