By Nico Maffey
If there is anything good that we can take from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is certainly the importance that data regained in public-policy design and execution. In this post we examine how three of the most economically important cities in the Americas – Miami, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires – have used data to guide their respective roads to recovery.
COVID-19 and data
After spreading to almost every country in the world, the pandemic has not only taken millions of lives, but has also deeply disrupted national economies and individual businesses. Recovery trends are expected to diverge among countries and regions, however, as there are presently significant variations in vaccination rates, stimulus programs, and levels of economic integration.
Cities have been hit hardest by COVID-19, as their large populations and high concentrations of economic activity have resulted in substantial restrictions and containment measures. Understanding how, through the use of data, cities have tackled the difficult task of preserving their citizens’ health while mitigating economic costs can help guide those government officials who are continuing to confront the pandemic’s devastating effects.
In this post we examine how three of the most economically important cities in the Americas – Miami, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires – have used data to guide their respective roads to recovery.
MIAMI: TURNING A CRISIS INTO AN OPPORTUNITY
With shots offered along beaches and a steadily decreasing number of COVID-19 cases, Miami met the pandemic’s myriad challenges by catalyzing new partnerships and ensuring that data remained at the core of decision-making.
Miami’s recovery – currently over 50 percent of adult county residents are fully vaccinated – is also a product of Florida’s state-level approach to COVID-19. In September, Governor Ron DeSantis lifted most state-level restrictions, and on May 3rd, he suspended all remaining county and local municipality restrictions by executive order. While a controversial public health decision, Florida has since become one of the first states to return to economic activity levels comparable to March 2019, before the introduction of pandemic-related restrictions.
The pandemic spurred Miami to establish and grow existing partnerships that allowed public sector officials to leverage data to design economic-recovery strategies.
According to Jennifer Hernandez, a senior data scientist at the city’s Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT) “Through a partnership with Mastercard, we saw that online spending skyrocketed while in-person spending fell quickly, so we knew that mom-and-pop shops were going to be in trouble. And that helped us improve the services [Miami] provided.”
But such innovations didn’t end with the private sector. Hernandez described the importance of collaborating with the federal government, whereby the city was “able to augment its business licensing data with federal data sets in order to understand which businesses were applying for help, and how help was being allocated and used.” She went on to explain that through centralization of data, “Miami is combining siloed databases into a data warehouse to make better informed decisions.”
As cities and states remain on the front lines in the economic battle against COVID-19, working together with federal policymakers will be crucial in getting the right help to Americans most in need.
Miami’s ability to weather the pandemic is the result of years of effort to more widely embrace data in city government: “The DoIT has been working for many years on building a data-driven culture in the government so that decision-makers feel comfortable understanding the power and limitations of data and we build a more resilient city,” explained Hernandez.
Shifting data practices inside the government has been described as one of the most critical barriers to understanding the power of data in helping solve public problems. Thus, it’s no surprise that Miami’s success in making decisions in response to the pandemic is the result of longstanding efforts to promote a cultural shift in the way data is utilized.
MEXICO CITY: STEPPING UP TO THE CHALLENGE OF DESIGNING SMARTER LOCKDOWNS
The fact that Mexico’s most densely-populated city has been one of the most effective in navigating the pandemic can be attributed, in part, to the work of its Digital Agency for Public Innovation (DAPI).
This relatively small government office has played a critical role in centralizing and integrating epidemiological and economic indicators to inform lockdown policies and design smart regulations. As Mariano Muñoz, a General Director at DAPI in charge of institutional operations explained, “We worked on an economic recovery plan where we crossed real-time epidemiological data, which contained information such as number of cases and where and how people were getting infected, with sector-specific economic data to think about how and when to open things up. For example, we considered what it would mean to open up restaurants at 40 percent capacity, 60 percent capacity, etc. Those models were used to guide the restrictions that we implemented in the city.”
This examination of disaggregated data was similarly used to inform the measures adopted around public transport, which pose a high risk of contagiousness if appropriate distance, ventilation, and hygiene measures are not enforced: “We made sure that when we reopened certain sectors we understood what the transport demand would be to avoid high levels of congestion and concentrations of passengers.”
There is evidence that these targeted, smarter lockdowns (as opposed to uniform restrictions across sectors and locations) can substantially reduce economic losses. Like Mexico City, such tailored responses to local conditions rely heavily on data, and are vital to managing infection rates and minimizing economic impact.
In contrast to the broad and blunt restrictions that other cities in Latin America have adopted, Mexico City’s use of data amid the pandemic illustrates the power of organizing and directing a targeted and sector-specific process of economic recovery by incorporating multiple layers of information to make comprehensive decisions in a context of uncertainty.
BUENOS AIRES- A DISCONNECT BETWEEN DATA AND POLICY
A recent study by Bloomberg which ranked 53 countries according to how effectively they handled the pandemic ranked Argentina 51st, with only Poland (52nd) and Brazil (53rd) performing worse. That there is still a strict lockdown in place means that an economic recovery is far from imminent.
Lockdowns in Buenos Aires have been notorious for disregarding and/or lacking a data-informed perspective. Restrictions have largely been sector-wide, without discerning their potential for spreading the virus. For example, while outdoor dining with special restrictions have been evidenced to show a low risk of contagiousness, the City authorities refrained from working with the Hospitality sector in order to design smart solutions. Furthermore, recently, when indicators for daily COVID-19 cases and deaths reached an all-time high, Buenos Aires opted for no reinstating any restrictions, due to the prolonged and highly unpopular lockdown that after almost eighteen months, still proved to be ineffective in curtailing the spread of the virus.
The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented challenge for cities on the front line, no matter their economic status. As a health, social, and economic crisis combined, it is laying bare how well city leaders are planning for recoveries and managing to contain the spread of the virus. This pandemic will continue forcing them to rethink the nature of their economies and realize the power of data to build safer, more resilient, and smarter cities.
