Backed by Google, epidemiologists launch a sweeping Covid-19 data platform

Last January, Samuel Scarpino wasn’t sure what to make of Covid-19. The director of Northeastern University’s Emergent Epidemics Lab, he, along with every other epidemiologist in the world, was trying to interpret the earliest data on the new virus.

He was soon pulled into working on a spreadsheet, started by a group of international epidemiologists, to collect and openly share granular data on individual Covid-19 cases around the world. Today, that project launched its complete website, Global.health, which will enable open access to more than 5 million anonymized Covid-19 records from 160 countries. Each record can contain dozens of data points about the case, including demographics, travel history, testing dates, and outcomes.

The project is supported by $1.25 million in funding and other resources from Google.org, with additional support from the Rockefeller Foundation, and is led by academics from the University of Oxford, Harvard, Northeastern, Boston Children’s Hospital, Georgetown, University of Washington, and Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.