Global Resources and Dashboards on Covid19

After weeks of researching an preparing, the Covid19 wave has hit the United States.  We had China, then Italy, then Spain bearing the initial impact of the wave of Covid19, but their warnings were either disbelieved or willfully ignored.  We had time for our government to prepare but we didn't have the political will or attention to listen to the virologists, epidemiologists and public health specialists who forecasted what we'd need.

In this short blog we will share key resources for others to use to track the pandemic.  First and foremost, this incredible resource includes Covid19 information in a wide range of languages.   The Covid Health Literacy Project translates basic and vital information into 37 languages.

Many have already found and rely upon the Johns Hopkins dashboardshowing the number of Covid19 cases across the world on a heat map, but also breaking down the number diagnosed, number dead and number recovered by country (and in some cases by city). The dashboard also tracks number of new cases, log scale and number of cumulative cases in easy to read graphs. 

For access to the Covid19 articles published by the premier medical journal, The Lancet, the user may search here.   Recent articles include practical research and input on preparing for pandemics and epidemics in large urban settings, drawing upon Wuhan (the largest quarantine in world history). Interestingly, the article notes that "Unconventional but reliable information channels and social media can be used for risk communication."  The Maternova team has found Twitter to be the most rapid fire, scientifically accurate, succinct way to get information about Covid19.  The Maternova team put together a Twitter list of 288 trusted voices on the pandemic, including a strong focus on the voices of women scientists and physicians. 

Called CORD-19 an open dataset has also been created for researchers to have ready access to data in Covid-19.  Initiated by the Allen Institute for AI,  "Kaggle is hosting the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset Challenge, a series of important questions designed to inspire the community to use CORD-19 to find new insights about the COVID-19 pandemic including the natural history, transmission, and diagnostics for the virus, management measures at the human-animal interface, lessons from previous epidemiological studies, and more."

We will continue to aggregate resources on Covid-19 with our next post covering the remarkable state of affairs in Covid-19 testing, PPE and ventilators and the unprecedented global effort to use FabLabs and MakerSpaces to fill the gap in critical equipment to fight the pandemic.