Project description:

The Greater region of Surabaya, which consists of Surabaya, Sidoarjo, and Gresik (SSG) becomes the epicentre of Covid-19 in East Java. It was the biggest contributor to national daily new cases, going toe-to-toe with DKI Jakarta. Ironically, this has happened after the determination of full large-scale social restrictions (PSBB) had been declared. There were some issues that have caused the spike of Covid-19 in East Java. First, the increase in people’s mobility in that province. The other reasons were the lack of people’s obedience of PSBB; low of tracing, isolation, and lack of cautious; testing capacity has not reached WHO

Impact reached:

According to website traffic, this “Tracing Causes of The Spike of Covid-19 Cases in East Java” has been read 14,360 times since published for the first time on 30 July 2020. 

The journalist has written about East Java in detailed. Since many media usually looks at DKI Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia as a benchmark. Therefore, this article has tried to find another side of the problem in Covid-19 pandemic management. 

This project also asks the readers to realize that this pandemic will be done if there is a collaboration among all of the parties (citizen, government, and stakeholder). Because of there were data that supported the article and highlight the issues, people cannot deny it.

Techniques/technologies used:

In order to manage the data, journalists have used Microsoft Excel. We have collected them from some sources, such as Covid-19 task force, the official site of East Java’s Government, Google Covid-19 Community Mobility and Facebook Movement Range. 

For the appearance, the journalist has shown the charts by Flourish. It helps the journalist to choose the data output. Therefore, it will help the reader to understand the data although there are many details of data. Flourish provides the chart’s link that is easy to use and attach for the news site.

What was the hardest part of this project?

All of the data in this project are available in real-time. Therefore, the journalist had to synchronize between the data and the issues since it keeps changing anytime. If the journalist could not finish this article quickly, then the hypothesis of the issues could be different from the first time of planning to write about it.

How to read Google Covid-19 Mobility Report and Facebook Movement Range were quite challenging. It was because of so much complex data that had to interpret and simplified. 

Although the appearance of this article is simple, it contains some data that proved the issues were real because it happened anywhere.

What can others learn from this project?

The article will get more value when there is shown by data. It proves that data is the strongest support in the article since counting on the interview of some experts are not enough. It must be supported by data, especially numbers since people tend to believe something that can be calculated. 

A journalist can use some types of data from many sources. All of the data in “Tracing Causes of The Spike of Covid-19 Cases in East Java” are available on the internet. 

However, the main issues of Covid-19 pandemic are not only in the capital city of Indonesia (Jakarta). Many other potential regions need to be blown-up because every area has its problem to control the infection of Covid-19.

Project links:

katadata.co.id/safrezifitra/analisisdata/5f23e88807580/melacak-penyebab-lonjakan-kasus-corona-di-jawa-timur

drive.google.com/drive/folders/1DTpn5ccard7UFcZex_Ao8PG3ukWEf3VQ?usp=sharing