Open Data Resources for Fighting COVID-19

TL;DR

This paper reviews open data resources related to COVID-19, highlighting their potential for analysis and control, while discussing limitations and providing guidance on accessing key datasets globally.

Contribution

It systematically identifies and describes open data sources for COVID-19 analysis, including variables, limitations, and access points, supporting data-driven pandemic response.

Findings

Catalogs major open COVID-19 data resources worldwide

Highlights limitations and challenges in open data availability

Provides guidance for accessing weather, demographic, and mobility data

Abstract

We provide an insight into the open data resources pertinent to the study of the spread of Covid-19 pandemic and its control. We identify the variables required to analyze fundamental aspects like seasonal behaviour, regional mortality rates, and effectiveness of government measures. Open data resources, along with data-driven methodologies, provide many opportunities to improve the response of the different administrations to the virus. We describe the present limitations and difficulties encountered in most of the open-data resources. To facilitate the access to the main open-data portals and resources, we identify the most relevant institutions, at a world scale, providing Covid-19 information and/or auxiliary variables (demographics, mobility, etc.). We also describe several open resources to access Covid-19 data-sets at a country-wide level (i.e. China, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, U.S., etc.). In an attempt to facilitate the rapid response to the study of the seasonal behaviour of Covid-19, we enumerate the main open resources in terms of weather and climate variables. CONCO-Team: The authors of this paper belong to the CONtrol COvid-19 Team, which is composed of different researches from universities of Spain, Italy, France, Germany, United Kingdom and Argentina. The main goal of CONCO-Team is to develop data-driven methods for the better understanding and control of the pandemic.