#Data4COVID19 Round-Up: 4 June
By: Andrew J. Zahuranec
Tags: Data4covid19, Covid 19, Data Stewardship, Data Collaborative, Data

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 by Unsplash/@freestocks licensed under CC0

What’s New in the #Data4COVID19 Repository

The #Data4COVID19 repository saw 9 new additions last week. The repository now includes 297 unique projects in every part of the globe, with changes in:

East Asia and Pacific: 14 (+1)

Europe and Central Asia: 62 (+1)

Latin America and the Caribbean: 12 (+0)

Middle East and North Africa: 1 (+0)

North America: 61 (+2)

South Asia: 3 (+1)

Sub-Saharan Africa: 13 (+0)

Global 91 (+4)

There remain 27 data challenges and 13 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.

Below are a few of the most notable additions to the repository. These examples speak to the different sources used to address the crisis — device-derived physiological data, social media data, and clinical trial data. They also speak to the diversity of actors from different sectors seeking ways to use data collaboration in the fight against COVID-19.

UCSF TemPredict Study: The UCSF TemPredict Study is a research initiative sponsored by Oura, a company which produces a wearable activity-tracking ring, at the University of California, San Francisco. The effort aims to study whether physiological data collected by an Oura ring, combined with symptom surveys, better predict the onset, progression, and recovery for COVID-19. The study will rely on 2,000 healthcare workers who will receive Oura rings and submit daily surveys of their symptoms. Current Oura owners can also sign up for the study via a dedicated webpage.

Citibeats–NTT Data Japan Dashboard: Citibeats, an artificial intelligence company, and NTT Data, a Japanese information technology company known for its language analysis technology, collaborated to create a dashboard representing topics of conversation in Japan amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The system works by collecting tweets made in Japan over a 30-day period and applying a semantic analysis algorithm to the collection to identify what issue the tweet is talking about, such as health care, sanitary supplies, food security, and the economy. The result of the analysis is then represented in a map, demonstrating which topics are of greatest concern for different prefectures.

Vivli Platform: Vivli is a nonprofit organization that operates as a data broker, managing a platform of the same name that allows organizations to share individual participant-level data from completed clinical trials for research purposes. Through the platform, individuals can search listed studies, request data sets or aggregated data, and share data of their own. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the platform has formed a relationship with d-wise, a clinical data consulting company, to waive all fees for sharing and accessing clinical trial data to encourage individuals to share and use data through the site to pursue COVID-19 treatments.

Update on the #Data4COVID19 Call for Action

80 days ago, The GovLab put forth a Call for Action toward building the data infrastructure and ecosystems needed to tackle pandemics and other dynamic threats. The call for action has been a key document in articulating the need for data action toward addressing COVID-19. It has informed our work on a variety of projects.

Given this milestone, we thought it useful to look at who had signed the Call to better identify how far the message has spread, which sectors have engaged most with it, and where gaps still remain. Our analysis reached a few findings.

Map of Call for Action signatories by indicated country

As of today, the Call has been signed by 469 people from 63 countries. Many of these signatories are from the United States (109). As the map above suggests, though, the document has attracted significant attention from across the world. Many of our signatories are from the countries most affected by the pandemic, including Italy (63) and the United Kingdom (57).

There also remains much interest across sectors. According to a quick analysis, our signatories tend to be affiliated with one of six types of organizations:

Research: 180 (39%)

Business: 127 (27%)

Nonprofits: 72 (15%)

International and Multilateral Organizations: 23 (5%)

Government: 18 (4%)

Unaffiliated/Other: 46 (10%)

There are clear gaps in representation geographically, given the lack of signatories in North Africa and the Middle East, and by sector, given the relatively few number of government-affiliated signatories. Nonetheless, it is clear that a wide variety of people from different backgrounds agree that we must take action to create the data ecosystem and infrastructure necessary for addressing dynamic threats like COVID-19.

We hope to build upon the expertise of these various professionals in the coming weeks. We also hope to address these gaps, both in the Call and in our living repository.

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