Part of a ZDNet Special Feature: Coronavirus: Business and technology in a pandemic

As COVID-19 data sets become more accessible, novel coronavirus pandemic may be most visualized ever

COVID-19 data sets are becoming widely available and more importantly packaged for consumption, visualization and analysis. We're all amateur epidemiologists now.

Written by Larry Dignan on April 20, 2020

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Coronavirus: Business and technology in a pandemic

From cancelled conferences to disrupted supply chains, not a corner of the global economy is immune to the spread of COVID-19.

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Data about the COVID-19 pandemic is being aggregated and prepped in a rapid clip as tech vendors are creating a stack of analysis tools for amateur epidemiologists as well as data science wonks.

Here's the upshot: This novel coronavirus outbreak may be the most visualized ever.

The first data analysis dashboard and aggregation tool appeared shortly after the COVID-19 outbreak in China. The dashboard, courtesy of Johns Hopkins University, has become a go-to data source since it visualizes and aggregates data from WHO, CDC, ECDC, NHC, DXY, 1point3acres, Worldometers.info, BNO, state and national government health departments, and local media reports.

Johns Hopkins also put the data on GitHub for use. Since the launch of that dashboard January 23, COVID-19 has become arguably the most visualized pandemic data set. While the sets were available from a variety of sources, the latest efforts revolve around providing clean data for analysis.

A tour of various efforts.

Tableau is taking the Johns Hopkins data and publishing a starter dashboard. Tableau's contribution to the effort revolves around preparing the data and making it available in various formats and a visualization template.
Esri is applying its mapping and geolocation expertise to COVID-19 tracking. Esri has also localized COVID-19 case data and combined it with bed availability data from Definitive Healthcare. The dashboard, which uses Esri's ArcGIS Business Analyst software, gives a snapshot of preparedness at the county level.
Facebook and Carnegie Mellon anonymized user data to track COVID-19 symptoms across the US.
Open source data sets have also been helpful. Researchers and Atlantic writers are pulling together data from numerous sources using open-source software.
GitHub has a series of data sets on novel coronavirus as does data.world and Kaggle, which has competitions, forecasts and visualizations.
Reddit's Data is Beautiful is a place to highlight a bevy of visualizations from hobbyists and data scientists. Our World in Data also has a strong overview of COVID-19 research and data.

Snowflake, a cloud data platform announced data services firm Starschema has listed a free data set that aims to be a single-source of truth for incidence and mortality in COVID-19 cases. The data can be augmented with population density and geolocations.
IBM has aggregated COVID-19 data and integrated it with The Weather Channel app, which will meld weather data and local novel coronavirus incidents. Via its The Weather Channel App, IBM's subsidiary can get relevant COVID-19 data to its 300 million active monthly users. The IBM visualizations rhymes with efforts from Google and Microsoft Bing, which aim to bring COVID-19 data to the masses.
ESO, a data software company that focuses on EMS, fire and hospital first responders to track response data across the US. The data set collects pre-hospital to hospital response and is collected from 2,600 EMS agencies across the US but excluding California.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation has a data set that looks at hospital bed use and need for intensive care beds and ventilators due to COVID-19.
C3.ai has created a unified data lake of all publicly available COVID-19 data sets. The data set will be available April 13 and updated again on May 15 with more data sets.