Fighting COVID-19 with Open Data
By: Wolfmedium Clauss
Tags: Coronavirus, Open Data, Pandemic, Covid 19, Corona

TL;DR: We need the best Information for everybody to escape the pandemic. Open data key to fight COVID-19. The author provides insight about what is required and why Open data is the main weapon against the virus.

The COVID-19 virus is everywhere and anyone is involvded in multiple ways with the virus. Everybody can talk about personal experiences. This expands to companies, goverments and organizations. Since the situation evolves and changes fast, everybody needs to make its own assessments and decisions based on their assessments. Crucial to this process is the availability of relevant. That means, information about COVID-19 needs to be

Local: COVID-19 infections happen to be on a person to person basis within a distance of 2 meters and below. Local means from starting with zero meters to the family, neigborhood, colleagues, town, city and country

Precice: Average numbers in a large region are worthless. We need to know the bed occupancy rate in the next hospital with all details, the exact infection rates in each location with ages, healh status, sexes, and so on

Immediate: The numbers of yesterday are far fewer relevant compared to the numbers of today. The progression of the COVID-19 numbers at least on a daily rate is an absolute must. Maybe we could learn even more about the pandemic from data updated every second.

Machine readable: The news media are important for widespread and national/global reporting on the pandemie but to make an effective strategy against CODIA-19 algorithms need to assist or even partially take over personal care against COVID-19. To feed these algorithms data has to be accessible in structured formats

Free: Since everybody on the planet is concerned about COVID-19 and governments can only make effective regulations when people are motivated to support the fight against COVID-19 in a large scale, data must be available free and without paying with either fees or privacy data. The fight against COVID-19 must not depend on personal wealth

Comprehensive: To make personal life COVID-19 save there is a lot of information required: when to go local shopping, how to safely use public transport, where not to travel to, how to stay safe at work, where is the next vaccination station, all about vaccine-counterindications, and so on.

Raw data with high quality: The rawer data, the more analytics can be done. And data source should make every kind of data available — of course with reasonable data quality management, respecting privacy concerns wherever this applies. If data sources publish their data directly data analytics can be verified easily. And raw data fuels data analytics creativity.

In an ideal world threatened by the virus, each person, each organisation, each politician each company feeds its algorithms to fight COVID-19 with this kind of information in order to make the best individual reactive strategy possible. So the main weapon against COVID-19 is data — and based on that data — information as stated above. If we want to succeed in fighting COVID-19 we need this data to be open.

Open data is the key to fight COVID-19 effectively on a large scale. We need Open data to feed personal algorithms that guide us on how to stay healthy.

With Open data about COVID-19 we have something like a hen-and-egg problem. Every data publisher needs to act in advance without knowing something about the usage and user of the data and every algorithm provider as app developer, news analysts or media journalists cannot build algroithms without data feeds. So government has to force both of them acting fast and providing the data and tools required in todays and maybe future panemies.

There are already some data sources and open data available related to COVID-19. But many possible data providers cannot imagine that they do have data which could be relevant to COVID-19. Here are some data samples which could help in order to illustrate the variety of data required:

COVID-19 tests (positiv, negative, quick tests, test locations, data about tester and tested people…)

Testing locations (GPS data, test frequency, waiting hours, …)

Medical backgound (statistics about ways of infections,…)

Research data for branches (music makers, sports, retail business, …)

Verlauf der Infektionen (Heilung / Todesfälle / Dauer des Verlaufs / …)

Local vaccine and COVID-19 chemicals availability (logistics, prices, stocks, …)

Political decisions and regulations (global, national and local) with history

Economic impacts of the pandemie

Cultural and social consequences of the pandemic

Regional zones and borders with COVID-19 patterns

Government relief programme from solo entrepreneurs to big companies with accurate usage numbers

This list could be expanded to any size. The availablility of data fuels algorithm provider and they need to be challenged to produce best in class tools to make theirs algorithms real health tools. Building a national COVID-19 App sponsored by governments is just one little step to fight the pendemic but by far not enough to save a society with its economic and cultural pillars.

The absence of Open data will make everybody rely on national, global data gathered and published by major or minor news media and data analytics which cannot easily by verified. So personal behaviour cannot be adjusted to each persons environment or life style.

Since Open data is hard to make available, startups, companies, government and research have to team to make it happen. Fast. Now. United. Against COVID-19 and its successors.

Disclaimer: The author Wolfgang Clauss is CEO of Ondics GmbH, a provider of Open data services in Germany. Ondics provides the COVID-19 open data portal https://corona-open-data.ckan.de/ which helps to get out of the COVID-19 Open data desert.