What data infrastructure supports efforts to understand and respond to COVID-19? What data is being generated to better understand COVID-19 and where is it being stored/analyzed/collected and to what effects?

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Angela Okune's picture
May 14, 2020
In response to:

AO: This Pathways International "COVID-19 Data Center" includes a section on "community mobility reports" which pulls fromĀ Google. The site directly repastes language from the original Google site about how the data aims to provide "insights into what has changed in response to policies aimed at combating COVID-19." The Google dataset is global and it is unclear how many users data contribute to the overall datasets. When I downloaded the Kenya specific dataset (which is only available as a PDF), there is no sense of what the overall total population included in the sample size is and the majority of the document states "there is not enough data". If there is not enough data at the country level in Kenya which has one of the highest mobile phone penetration rates on the continent, why would I trust what the "data" (or lack thereof) says about any other African country? It is highly problematic if a limited sample of individuals across the entire continent are being aggregated and then represented as COVID-19 in "Africa" in the aggregate...