#Data4COVID19 Round-Up: 13 August
By: Andrew J. Zahuranec
Tags: Data, Covid 19, Data4covid19, Data Collaborative, 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/John Cameron is licensed under CC0

Summer of Open Data

The GovLab, through the Open Data Policy Lab, has continued to produce resources for the Summer of Open Data, a three-month project conducted in partnership with the Open Data Institute, the Open Data Charter, Digital Trade & Data Governance Hub, and BrightHive to jump start an exploration into the third wave of open data that addresses data gaps and is fueled by enhanced data collaboration.

In the last two weeks, The GovLab published a blog and video for a keynote conversation with Taiwanese Digital Minister Audrey Tang on a variety of topics, including.Taiwan’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The GovLab also published a blog and video for a panel with Barbara Ubaldi (OECD), Arturo Franco (Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth), and Jean-Noé Landry (Open North). During the 45-minute conversation, the participants discuss a variety of opportunities and challenges pertaining to the Third Wave of Open Data.

You can read more about the overall effort here and find a schedule here. Videos and blogs will be posted each Wednesday on the Open Data Policy Lab’s Medium site. Next week, we will publish a panel with Jaimie Boyd (British Columbia), Malarvizhi Veerappan (World Bank), and Arturo Muente Kunigami (Inter-American Development Bank).

What’s New in the #Data4COVID19 Repository

The #Data4COVID19 repository added seven more entries this week, expanding to 339 in total. Projects now span:

East Asia and Pacific: 18 (+2)

Europe and Central Asia: 67 (+2)

Latin America and the Caribbean: 13 (+0)

Middle East and North Africa: 1 (+0)

North America: 72 (+0)

South Asia: 3 (+0)

Sub-Saharan Africa: 17 (+1)

Global: 106 (+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 innovative data sources. The first example seeks to quantify government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic while the second seeks to use search engine data for public health purposes. The final example is an emerging effort to bring together epidemiologists, economists, and other experts together to inform government action.

Oxford Coronavirus Government Response Tracker: The Oxford Coronavirus Government Response Tracker is a tool launched by the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government to systematically track and score responses to COVID-19 worldwide. Measured against 17 indicators that score responses on a 1 to 100 scale, the tracker assesses how forceful a government is in responding to the pandemic. Noting diverging approaches and outcomes in the United States, an update to the platform in April provided users with the ability to view policy responses in the US on a state-by-state level.

Providing early indication of regional anomalies in COVID19 case counts in England using search engine queries: Researchers with Microsoft Research, University College London, and Public Health England analyzed searches on Bing in England to identify possible cases of influenza-like illnesses like COVID-19. The researchers looked at the number of searches for “fever,” “cough,” and similar terms and found that areas with the highest rates of searches correlated with future cases of COVID-19. The researchers argue this information could be used to strategize and better plan responses to COVID-19.

Pintig Lab: Pintig Lab is a multi-stakeholder network of data scientists, epidemiologists, economists, and other experts convened by UNDP Philippines. Participants collect and analyze data from public and private sources to inform the government’s response to COVID-19. At launch, the lab had created a visual dashboard to capture trends of cases, deaths, recoveries, and hospital and laboratory capacities. The lab is also working on a project that seeks to determine the impact of quarantine on the spread of the disease and on economic activity.

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