In late March, the Ecuadorean city of Guayaquil was hit by one of the world’s worst coronavirus outbreaks. A collapsed health system forced families to leave the corpses of loved ones on street corners, sometimes for days under the burning sun.
That’s when Hector Hugo, a 32-year-old urban planner, began making maps tracking the pandemic. He used Health Ministry data to get the home addresses of hospital patients with respiratory problems, and stumbled upon a record of 911 calls, which he filtered to monitor requests to collect corpses or for ambulances to pick up people struggling to breathe.
He turned the data into maps that helped pinpoint which neighborhoods were the hardest hit and where the virus would likely spread next.
“A silent, invisible enemy was stalking the city,” said Mr. Hugo, a tall, youthful looking man with glasses. “We needed a mechanism to make the enemy visible.”
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