Lessons from COVID-19 pandemic for future preparedness. Examples of GIS and geocoding applications in Rome

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of dynamic spatial distribution systems, especially for nonpharmaceutical interventions and real-time monitoring of epidemiology for making predictions. A judicious use of these technologies could enable making decisions in advance (e.g., increasing the number of hospital beds and medical personnel, enhancing equipment for specific areas) and assessing the effectiveness of measures taken (e.g., border closures, vaccination). Additionally, it can be used to monitor the varied distribution of viral genetic vari-ants of concern for epidemiological and therapeutic purposes. In this work, after a synthetic overview of some aspects concerning SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 pandemic, we provide an applied example of geocoding and data aggregation in GIS environment which may be used both in the first phase of emergencies, to identify spatial clusters and to hypothesize the evolution trend, and over the time to monitoring the disease patterns. For this example, also in the perspective of precision preparedness, we focus the GIS elaborations on a set of data regarding the period from 25 February to 26 September 2020 showing for the territory of Rome (Italy) some potentialities of geocoding and data aggregation.