#Data4COVID19 Round-Up: 15 May
By: Andrew J. Zahuranec
Tags: Data4covid19, Covid 19, Data Stewardship, Data Collaborative, Data

Welcome to The GovLab’s #Data4COVID19 Round-Up. This short-term, 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. Have an interesting novel coronavirus-related project worth sharing? Send it to us at datastewards@thegovlab.org so we can consider it as an addition.

What’s New in the #Data4COVID19 Repository

In the past week, we’ve added 29 entries to the repository. These additions span a number of regions, including East Asia and the Pacific (2), Europe and Central Asia (5), Latin America and the Caribbean (1), the Middle East and North Africa (1), North America (1). We have also had several projects with a global focus (6) and multiple calls for proposals or requests for expertise. In total, these additions bring us to 262 COVID-19 related 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. A project’s inclusion does not indicate endorsement by The GovLab or confirmation of its success in meeting its goals.



This week’s additions include:



Americans Didn’t Wait For Their Governors To Tell Them To Stay Home Because Of COVID-19: The news site FiveThirtyEight worked with a professor at Duke University Medical Center to analyze human mobility amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis, which relied on mobility data provided by the location intelligence company Cuebiq, found that US residents did not wait for government orders to stay home but began reducing travel around March 11th. The analysis also found significant declines in social distancing regardless of a state’s political affiliation.



Tracking Mental Health During the Coronavirus Pandemic: Researchers from CIFAR, the Canada-based charity focused on issues of science and technology, and Amii, the Alberta-based machine intelligence nonprofit, are working with the University of Alberta, Western University, and New York University to study social media to understand the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on mental health. The research, funded by a CIFAR AI grant, will apply AI techniques and natural language processing to data drawn from Twitter and Reddit.



Indonesia Bergerak: Laporan Warga (Indonesia Moves: Citizen Report) Dashboard: Qlue, a Jakarta-based startup focused on smart city technology, worked in collaboration with Telekom Indonesia’s MDI Ventures and Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Agency to create a citizen reporting platform for COVID-19. Using Qlue’s platform, individuals can report on suspected cases of COVID-19, crowds, and full hospitals. These reports are visualized in open maps, which people can use to find issues in their community. The platform also provides statistics on reports and a Whatsapp-facilitated chatbot that can answer basic questions.



#DigitalAgainstCovid19 Challenge: The Asian Development Bank is hosting a challenge calling on researchers to develop ways to measure economic activity using alternative, non-statistical sources and approaches. The challenge aims to help countries in Asia and the Pacific region to respond more rapidly to the COVID-19 pandemic. Individuals who apply to participate are asked to tackle one of four areas of focus: production; demand; external trade and income; or prices.



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