Data Is Plural

COVID-19 testing in the US. The COVID Tracking Project “collects information from 50 US states, the District of Columbia, and 5 other U.S. territories to provide the most comprehensive testing data we can collect for the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2.” The project — a collaboration between The Atlantic, data scientist Jeff Hammerbacher, and a growing team of volunteers — “attempt[s] to include positive and negative results, pending tests, and total people tested for each state or district currently reporting that data.” (Unfortunately, not all states are reporting each of those numbers, and private-lab testing also complicates the picture.) You can access the data online, through an API, on GitHub, and via Twitter. Related: How to Understand Your State’s Coronavirus Numbers (The Atlantic, March 12).

Coronavirus research papers. The COVID-19 Open Research Dataset is “a free resource of over 29,000 scholarly articles, including over 13,000 with full text, about COVID-19 and the coronavirus family of viruses for use by the global research community.” The dataset, produced by a collaboration of several research groups and the National Library of Medicine, “will be updated weekly." Related: On Monday, the White House issued a “call to action to the tech community” regarding the dataset, asking experts “to develop new text and data mining techniques that can help the science community answer high-priority scientific questions related to COVID-19.”

WFH. Stayinghome.club is compiling hundreds of coronavirus-spurred work-from-home policies, university annoucements, and event cancellation statuses. The project is collaboratively edited on GitHub, and includes instructions for how to add your company/university/event. [h/t Jackie Kazil]

Health security preparedness. The Global Health Security Index is “the first comprehensive assessment and benchmarking of health security and related capabilities across the 195 countries” that signed on to the WHO’s 2005 International Health Regulations. The index is built on a “framework of 140 questions, organized across 6 categories, 34 indicators, and 85 subindicators to assess a country’s capability to prevent and mitigate epidemics and pandemics.” The first edition of the index was released this past October, and can be downloaded as a macro-enabled Excel spreadsheet. The National Health Security Preparedness Index aims to do something similar, but for US states; the 2019 results are also available as a spreadsheet. [h/t Big Local News]

Speed dating. Between 2002 and 2004, professors Ray Fisman and Sheena Iyengar ran a series of speed dating events for Columbia University graduate students, while collecting detailed data on the participants and results. The full dataset is available to download; data scientist Keith McNulty has also created a simplified version of it.