#Data4COVID19 Round-Up: 18 June
By: Andrew J. Zahuranec
Tags: Data Collaborative, Data4covid19, Data, Covid 19, Data Stewardship

Welcome to The GovLab’s #Data4COVID19 Round-Up. This temporary, weekly curation will provide you with notable updates to the #Data4COVID19 data collaborative repository and other information meant to facilitate data stewardship in the ongoing pandemic. If you received this email from a colleague, you can subscribe here.

PHOTO: Unsplash/Graham Ruttan is licensed under CC0

What’s New in the #Data4COVID19 Repository

This week the #Data4COVID19 repository expanded to 310 entries. The repository now includes projects that can be found in:

East Asia and Pacific: 15 (+0)

Europe and Central Asia: 61 (+0)

Latin America and the Caribbean: 13 (+1)

Middle East and North Africa: 1 (+0)

North America: 64 (+1)

South Asia: 3 (+0)

Sub-Saharan Africa: 14 (+0)

Global: 97 (+2)

There remain 27 data challenges, but we have added an addition to our list of requests for data, bringing it to 15 projects.



Each week, we will highlight a few of those recent additions to the repository that you might have missed. These examples illustrate innovative methods, appear demand-driven, or otherwise demonstrate an attempt to translate insights into action. We also aspire, to the extent possible, to make the selections geographically diverse. A project’s inclusion does not indicate endorsement by The GovLab or confirmation of its success in meeting its goals.



This week, we focus on three notable research initiatives. The first two use data for public health, improving diagnosis and identification of risk. The last seeks to improve understanding of COVID-19’s relation to social, behavioral, and economic issues.



Coughvid: Coughvid is an initiative undertaken by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne to determine whether it is possible to screen people for COVID-19 infection by analyzing recordings of their coughs. The researchers ask individuals to record themselves coughing and to submit it along with a listing of their symptoms. This information will be used to compile an anonymized sample of recordings from patients with COVID-19. Researchers hope to subsequently apply signal processing, pervasive computing, and machine learning to develop a mobile application that can allow individuals to screen themselves from their homes.

Medical Home Network AI: The Medical Home Network, a non-for-profit medical technology organization, is working with ClosedLoop, a Texas-based AI company, to develop a predictive model for assessing which patients are at highest risk of suffering complications from COVID-19. The research relies on data from 122,000 patients to determine which social and medical factors increase vulnerability.

Societal Experts Action Network (SEAN) COVID-19 Survey Archive: The Societal Experts Action Network — an expert group created by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and National Science Foundation to support evidence-based decision-making for local, state, and national policymakers — created a searchable archive of probability-based surveys on the COVID-19 pandemic. Users who visit the site can search for survey questions (obtained from open-access sources) polled in the United States and internationally. This information can be used to study social, economic, or behavioral issues related to COVID-19. The network also provides a weekly summary of updates to the archive.

You can also find additional resources related to data stewardship and data collaboration here.