The Google.org and Rockefeller Foundation teams have launched an open access platform, Global.health, based on anonymized data intended to strengthen the fight against Covid-19.
To enable researchers around the world to trace and model the trajectory of Covid-19, a consortium made up of scientists from Oxford University, Northeastern University, Harvard and Boston's Children Hospital has launched, in collaboration with Google .org and the Rockefeller Foundation, a platform that can bring together several million cases of Covid-19, called Global.Health. Coming from more than 100 countries, they will fill the evolving platform with anonymized data that is accessible to everyone, including the general public.
Practical data available to the public and epidemiologists
The Global.Health platform offers a free and turnkey tool to researchers around the world who wish to model the trajectory of Covid-19 but also of its variants and other possible infectious diseases. A real pool of data that can be used as a tool at the service of the global early warning system for the epidemics and pandemics of tomorrow.
This tool is far from being born on a whim. By the end of 2019, the group of researchers cited at the beginning of the article had joined forces and alerted the World Health Organization (WHO) to the dangerousness of this new coronavirus. Except that the model of the time, based on Google Sheets, quickly proved to be very limited.
The researchers then turned to Google.org, the philanthropic unit of the Mountain View firm, for help. And it was a success, since Google.org devoted 1.25 of the 100 million dollars allocated to the fight against the pandemic to the mission of the researchers. In addition to the necessary financial means, Google has provided them with around ten volunteers, who
The fruit of an international collaboration ... still incomplete, but which respects privacy
As long as a country adheres to it or decides to explore the data, Global.Health proves to be a formidable tool for epidemiologists around the world. Today and tomorrow, they have and will have access to organized, reliable and above all anonymized data, available in open access and in real time.
The platform benefits from the effort of researchers from multiple international institutions to create a database and map that both bring together epidemic data from various communities and then make it available. “ By creating a centralized open resource of verified case-level data from around the world, our goal is to accelerate the work of researchers, public health officials and the global community to better prepare, respond and reduce the burden. burden of disease outbreaks. We hope this work will help cultivate a global community invested in improving health outcomes for all through open and secure data sharing , ”says the platform team.
Global.Health now includes data from nearly 10 million cases from many countries, the main ones being Colombia, Germany, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Argentina, Japan and Great Britain. Brittany. France, like Spain and Italy, has not yet sent data to the platform.