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Oxford University teams up with Google on Covid database

OXFORD University and Google have unveiled a brand new platform to track Covid-19 data.

Global.health website, which was launched on Wednesday, builds on an idea first initiated by university in January last year.

The first of its kind, open-access database pulls together anonymised data on as many individual cases as possible.

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Following early investment by the Oxford Martin School at the start of the pandemic, Google.org – Google’s charitable arm – provided funding and a team of ten full-time fellows and seven part-time volunteers to scale up the project to a massive, open resource of verified case-level data from around the world.

The project combines expertise in epidemiology, public health, and data science to build a clean, standardised and geo-coded database for the pandemic, down to an individual case-by-case level.

This open, anonymized dataset is ‘unprecedented’ and it is set to make key understandings for controlling and ending the Covid-19 pandemic, like tracking the R-number or epidemiological modelling, easier and more accurate.

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Dr Moritz Kraemer, Branco Weiss research fellow in the Department of Zoology at the university, said: “This is the global and scalable result of the ad-hoc work we started early last year when the world started to take notice of a new, emerging disease that we now know as Covi-19.

“Many of the initial scientific papers looking at what was happening with Covid all utilised this data framework, started in an excel spreadsheet with no funding, and we knew we needed to take it to a global scale.

“I see this as one of the first stepping stones to a more open and readily integrated disease surveillance system globally.”




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