#Data4COVID19 Round-Up: 2 July
By: Andrew J. Zahuranec
Tags: Data Collaborative, Data Stewardship, Data, Data4covid19, Covid 19

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/Claudio Schwarz is licensed under CC0

#Data4COVID19 Hub

Last week, The GovLab launched its new hub for its assorted work on COVID-19: data4covid19.org. Here, you can find the latest updates on our work and information on how we’re working to fulfill our Call for Action toward building the data infrastructure and ecosystem needed to tackle pandemics and other dynamic societal and environmental threats.



The site lists the various projects we are working on, including the Data Assembly, an initiative from The GovLab with support from the Henry Luce Foundation to solicit diverse, actionable public input on data re-use for crisis response in the United States. Additional information on the project can be found at: https://thedataassembly.org/.



Call for Papers: Special Collection on Telco Big Data for COVID-19

Data & Policy, the peer-reviewed, open access venue dedicated to the potential of data science to address important policy challenges, is putting forth a special call for papers on the use of big telecommunications data for COVID-19 response.



The journal invites telecommunications companies, their partners, governments, policymakers and research institutions to submit papers describing their concrete experiences with governmental or institutional use of big data analytics and decision-support tools from mobile operators in the fight against COVID-19. It encourages authors to submit papers describing the context; approach; outcomes and impact; and lessons learned.



This information will be compiled into a special collection of articles that will provide readers with real experiences on governmental or institutional use of big data analytics and decision-support tools from mobile operators in the fight against COVID-19. More information can be found at the announcement here.



Upcoming Event

Registration is open for the July 14th Responsible Data Summit, organized by the University of California Berkeley, MIT, and Responsible Data Foundation. The Summit will feature a track on Responsible Data in the Time of a Pandemic, in which participants “will explore the perspectives and experiences of leaders fighting COVID-19 with data and new technologies, and host a discussion about how we all — as responsible data stewards — can use data responsibly to fight both the current pandemic and infectious diseases in the future.” The organizers are inviting “short presentation spotlights of approximately 5 minutes to highlight relevant work in responsible data use for COVID-19.”



What’s New in the #Data4COVID19 Repository

The #Data4COVID19 repository added three more entries this week, expanding to 318 in total. Projects now span:

East Asia and Pacific: 15 (+0)

Europe and Central Asia: 61 (+0)

Latin America and the Caribbean: 13 (+0)

Middle East and North Africa: 1 (+0)

North America: 68 (+2)

South Asia: 3 (+0)

Sub-Saharan Africa: 14 (+0)

Global: 99 (+1)

There remain 27 data challenges and 15 requests for data.



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’s entries center on data reuse. Each example shows how data can be compiled and analyzed to create new value.



Quandl Analysis of COVID-19’s Economic Impact: Quandl, a financial services company that indexes numerical datasets, used its “alternative data” assets to assess the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, Japan, and the United States. The company uses data from transit authorities, railway operators, telecommunications networks, and government briefings on consumer traffic to assess the impact of shelter-in-place directives, noting the orders led to substantial declines in movement. The analysis also uses time-tracking data from software companies like Homebase to measure the number of small-business closures. This analysis suggests roughly 65 percent of New York businesses closed in January 2020 while 50 percent of Texan businesses and 52 percent of Californian businesses did that same. Quandl’s proprietary data on US job listings, meanwhile, suggested large increases in hiring by large companies such as Amazon, Kroger, Walmart, and AT&T.



Institute for Data Valorization COVID-19 Data Hub: The Institute for Data Valorization, an academic and industrial initiative between HEC Montréal, École Polytechnique de Montreal and Université de Montréal, has created a unified, cleaned collection of data related to COVID-19 to simplify data acquisitions and support use of data around the world. It supports 190 countries. The source code for the project is available on GitHub.



California COVID Assessment Tool: The California Covid Assessment Tool is an open-source “model of models,” created by the State of California, that seeks to compile different assessments of the spread of COVID-19 statewide in California and locally. Individuals can view a nowcast (which assesses the current situation), forecasts (which assesses expected impact in 2–4 weeks), and scenarios (which look at long-term impact). Officials intend for the site to improve how the state, counties, and public make decisions and to spur collaboration with other states and researchers. The source code is publicly available on GitHub.



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