• Home
  • About

GIScience News Blog

News of Heidelberg University’s GIScience Research Group.

Feed on
Posts
Comments
« 4D change analysis for improving our understanding of dynamic landscapes
Globales Gletschermonitoring - Chance und Herausforderung — HGG Vortrag am 19.Januar 2021 Dr. Isabelle Gärtner-Roer, World Glacier Monitoring Service, Universität Zürich »

Accessibility to pharmacies in Germany with 15km Covid-19 restriction

Jan 9th, 2021 by Sven Lautenbach

Current lockdown regulations in Germany state that - in many but not all federal states - travel in COVID-19 hotspot regions is only allowed up to 15km distance. This has raised concerns since a 15km radius has been perceived by some as a serious constraint especially in rural regions. Clearly, this might prevent visits to friends and family - but this is of course the intention of the regulation which aims at a reduction of person to person contacts to reduce the virus spread. A different question is if basic needs can still be fulfilled given a radius of 15km. The regulations as far as known allow travel with a reasonable reason such as going to work, to a supermarket, a doctor or a pharmacy even if that is farther than 15km.

Still, it is an interesting question how far basic supplies are away from the inhabitants in Germany since this could be seen as an indicator for the equivalence of living conditions that are written in the German constitution. We looked at this by the example of pharmacies. OpenStreetMap (OSM) contained recently around 18.856 pharmacies in Germany which were concentrated in regions of higher population density. However, pharmacies are well enough distributed that only a small part of Germany is farther than 15km away from the next pharmacy (maximum distance ~19km).

Pharmacy locations derived from OpenStreetMap. Map data copyrighted OpenStreetMap contributors and available from https://www.openstreetmap.org

These areas are furthermore only sparsely populated, especially in parts of Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-West Pomerania. According to the census from 2011 these areas are home to less than 2900 inhabitants. More than 76 million inhabitants live closer than 5km to the next pharmacy.

These distances can be interpreted as distances from the front door to the pharmacy. The lockdown regulations are a bit fuzzy with respect to how to measure the 15km distance but at least for several federal states they seem to be interpreted as distance from the boundary of the settlement - so lockdown relevant distances would even be smaller.

The number of pharmacies in OSM seems relatively complete if we look at the development of pharmacies reported in OSM over time. The decrease in recent years could be related with the close-down of pharmacies in rural areas as part of a concentration process. The calculations are based on the open-source OSM history analytics platform ohsome by HeiGIT.

The counts were queried for each district and each month using the ohsome API.

The counts were queried for each district and each month using the ohsome API. https://ohsome.org

According to the Deutsche Apotheker Zeitung 18,987 pharmacies were reported in Germany in March 2020. This matches relatively well with the 18,856  pharmacies that were present in OSM at the beginning of January 2021, some may have closed since then. And finally here is the challenge: can you find the (potentially?) missing 131 pharmacies and add them to OSM?

Btw, you may also be interested in our short analysis of accessibility of COVID-19 vaccitation centers in Germany.

Some of our earlier work related to public health / accessiblity using OSM:

  • Mapping physical access to health-care for older adults in sub-saharan-africa and implications for the covid-19-response - a cross-sectional analysis
  • Exploring OSM for healthcare access analysis in Sub-Saharan-Africa
  • OSM-Completeness of health-facilities in Sub-Sahara-Africa
  • Recent changes to openstreetmap healthcare infrastructure in India
  • New jupyter notebook: Analysis of access to health-care using openrouteservice isochrones-api-2
  • Exploring OSM history - the example of health related amenities
  • Quota for openrouteservice multi-vehicle-optimization increased to support logistics during corona-crisis
  • Data-journalism-webapp about accessibility in sweden according to corona travel recommendations

Tags: Accessibility, Completeness, corona, COVID-19, healthcare, ohsome, OpenStreetMap, Public Health

Posted in OSM, Press release, Public Health

Comments are closed.

  • About

    GIScience News Blog
    News of Heidelberg University’s GIScience Research Group.
    There are 1,674 Posts and 0 Comments so far.

  • Meta

    • Log in
    • Entries RSS
    • Comments RSS
    • WordPress.org
  • Recent Posts

    • New paper on the automatic characterization of surface activities from 4D point clouds
    • OSHDB Version 1.0 Has Arrived
    • Job Opening for Postdoc / Senior Researcher on OpenStreetMap Road Quality Analysis
    • Geography Awareness Week 14.-19.11.2022
    • Open Data: Multi-platform point clouds and orthophotos of the inland dune in Sandhausen
  • Tags

    3D 3DGEO Big Spatial Data CAP4Access Citizen Science Conference crisis mapping Crowdsourcing data quality deep learning disaster DisasterMapping GeoNet.MRN GIScience heigit HOT humanitarian humanitarian mapping Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team intrinsic quality analysis landuse laser scanning Lidar machine-learning Mapathon MapSwipe MissingMaps Missing Maps ohsome ohsome example Open data openrouteservice OpenStreetMap OSM OSM History Analytics Public Health Quality quality analysis remote sensing routing social media spatial analysis Teaching VGI Workshop
  • Archives

    • December 2022
    • November 2022
    • October 2022
    • September 2022
    • August 2022
    • July 2022
    • June 2022
    • May 2022
    • April 2022
    • March 2022
    • February 2022
    • January 2022
    • December 2021
    • November 2021
    • October 2021
    • September 2021
    • August 2021
    • July 2021
    • June 2021
    • May 2021
    • April 2021
    • March 2021
    • February 2021
    • January 2021
    • December 2020
    • November 2020
    • October 2020
    • September 2020
    • August 2020
    • July 2020
    • June 2020
    • May 2020
    • April 2020
    • March 2020
    • February 2020
    • January 2020
    • December 2019
    • November 2019
    • October 2019
    • September 2019
    • August 2019
    • July 2019
    • June 2019
    • May 2019
    • April 2019
    • March 2019
    • February 2019
    • January 2019
    • December 2018
    • November 2018
    • October 2018
    • September 2018
    • August 2018
    • July 2018
    • June 2018
    • May 2018
    • April 2018
    • March 2018
    • February 2018
    • January 2018
    • December 2017
    • November 2017
    • October 2017
    • September 2017
    • August 2017
    • July 2017
    • June 2017
    • May 2017
    • April 2017
    • March 2017
    • February 2017
    • January 2017
    • December 2016
    • November 2016
    • October 2016
    • September 2016
    • August 2016
    • July 2016
    • June 2016
    • May 2016
    • April 2016
    • March 2016
    • February 2016
    • January 2016
    • December 2015
    • November 2015
    • October 2015
    • September 2015
    • August 2015
    • July 2015
    • June 2015
    • May 2015
    • April 2015
    • March 2015
    • February 2015
    • January 2015
    • December 2014
    • November 2014
    • October 2014
    • September 2014
    • August 2014
    • July 2014
    • June 2014
    • May 2014
    • April 2014
    • March 2014
    • February 2014
    • January 2014
    • December 2013
    • November 2013
    • October 2013
    • September 2013
    • August 2013
    • July 2013
    • June 2013
    • May 2013
    • April 2013
  •  

    January 2021
    M T W T F S S
    « Dec   Feb »
     123
    45678910
    11121314151617
    18192021222324
    25262728293031
  • Recent Comments

    GIScience News Blog CC by-nc-sa Some Rights Reserved.

    Free WordPress Themes | Fresh WordPress Themes