Who are the people working to combat COVID-19? Anyone who believes that only scientists are working in the healthcare field is mistaken.
Data science extracts information, generates new ideas, and makes predictions using scientific methods, processes, algorithms, and systems based on structured (organized) or unstructured data (messages, images, etc.). Below, I will present just 3 examples among hundreds of groups mobilized worldwide using data science to mitigate the impacts on society, the economy, and, above all, health:
Data Scientist Warns
Tomas Pueyo is an engineer who wrote an article that received millions of views. He is not an epidemiologist, but that does not mean his data analysis is flawed. Pueyo's analysis exemplifies what came to be known as the "flatten the curve" strategy. The main point of the analysis is that COVID-19 is now a pandemic, therefore it cannot be eliminated, but its impact can be reduced. The goal should be to have as few people infected at the same time as possible, spreading out the period of infections and easing the strain on healthcare systems around the world.
https://medium.com/tomas-pueyo/coronavirus-por-que-devemos-agir-j%C3%A1-5eaa5d337af5
Loft's Predictions
Loft's Data Science team (a Brazilian startup for buying and selling apartments) conducted a study to predict pandemic scenarios in Brazil. In order to understand how COVID-19 would spread across Brazil to make business decisions and also raise awareness within the community, the Loft team published its study projecting the peak in the second week of April.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZDxOrn9ZljIzrfAnUiDjjLR28ORrvn6tHi2q3ig6WKc/mobilebasic
Business Intelligence for Humanity
One of the world's leading business intelligence and data analysis software companies, Tableau, launched a special page so that companies worldwide can use pandemic data within their businesses. It is possible to cross internal data with the spread of the coronavirus in various regions of the world. Several companies and institutions are already making their analyses publicly available through the Tableau platform.
https://public.tableau.com/profile/covid.19.data.resource.hub#!/vizhome/COVID-19Cases_15840488375320/COVID-19Cases
Public Data
Thanks to the internet, some institutions and independent professionals are making (updated) data available on cases, genomes, and scientific discoveries. See the main data sources being used to make predictions:
World Health Organization
The WHO is gathering the latest scientific discoveries and knowledge about coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and compiling them into a database. They are updating the database daily using bibliographic research, data from newspapers around the world, and other relevant scientific articles. New research will be added regularly.
Global database of scientific discoveries about COVID-19
Johns Hopkins
Johns Hopkins University is tracking the spread of COVID-19 in real time through an interactive dashboard with data available for download. They are also creating models of the virus's spread. The preliminary results of the study are discussed on our blog.
Access the COVID-19 data research repository
NextStrain
The project aims to provide a real-time view of populations infected by diseases and provide interactive data visualizations to virologists, epidemiologists, public health workers, and citizen scientists worldwide.
You can find the dataset for the new coronavirus COVID-19 on GitHub
