Coronavirus and open data

The demand for access to data to aid public understanding of governmental responses to the coronavirus pandemic has been notable across the world.

The Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore have been collating data from across this world, creating a dashboard as well as downloads of the data from GitHub.

https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

In Europe, the two countries most severely impacted by coronavirus have been exemplars in their approach to releasing data and supporting the development of dashboard analytics.

The Italian Governments Civil Protection Department Coronavirus Dashboard includes downloads of the data by Italian Province and Region (as well as the ability to download the source data):

http://opendatadpc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/b0c68bce2cce478eaac82fe38d4138b1

The Spanish Ministry of Health Situation of COVID-19 in Spain Dashboard also provides downloads of data in CSV format by administrative regions.

https://covid19.isciii.es/

The Irish Government Approach has seen the development of the Government of Ireland COVID-19 dashboard on Ordnance Survey Ireland’s GeoHive. Created via a collaboration between Central Statistics Office, Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government, AIRO and Esri Ireland, the data is also available on the Irish Open Data portal.

https://data.gov.ie/blog/coronavirus-covid-19

Public Health England have produced a coronavirus tracker dashboard that also includes the option to download data as a CSV file.

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

The situation in the UK has been commented on by a number of transparency advocates, including Jeni Tennison, Vice President and Chief Strategy Adviser at the Open Data Institute who raises issues with the UK approach to open data publication of coronavirus data.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/02/government-publish-data-coronavirus-deaths

In Northern Ireland the Public Health Agency publishes a COVID-19 Surveillance Bulletin that describes COVID-19 activity in Northern Ireland and is produced Monday to Friday. The data is published within a PDF report that can be found here: https://www.publichealth.hscni.net/publications/covid-19-surveillance-reports