CoronavirusAPI Public Health Initiative
Data projects are hard work, but since mid-February a group of friends with backgrounds in law, economics, programming, data science and blockchain have been building something for the HELPERS. The completely self-funded effort has built an easily accessible public resource in a matter of weeks that makes actionable the 50+ different officially published state health records on Coronavirus.
The tech side of this growing volunteer effort is a team working remotely from around the USA led by Danny Yang, a well-known data, AI and blockchain technology professional. The data science and economics part of this initiative receives support from George Pullen, a Professor of economics & social impact of technology with the University of New Hampshire Law Blockchain program.
Susan Joseph, the founder of the initiative and CEO of CoronavirusAPI.com, is a respected FinTech & insurance lawyer and consultant, as well as leader of Diversity in Blockchain. She says that the project is so important because it is geeks and nerds doing four things no one else is doing for the HELPERS:
(1) Automatically collecting and archiving official State reported health data on the virus and transforming it from 50+ formats to one uniform data standard that can be accessed through an easy to use interface.
(2) Providing transparency that allows for actionable insights for areas just starting to see a surge in cases based on patterns in other regions, which benefits planning efforts, prioritizing medical resources, policymaking and supply chain optimization.
(3) Giving Free API (data feed) of everything they collect, harmonize and publish for other researchers, forecasters, and HELPERS to use analyzing the big picture.
(4) Offering User friendly “explore and click” site features to look at what’s happening in your state over time, to include total: tested, positive, and deaths.
Link to the site is here: http://coronavirusapi.com/
Previous Media/Press is here: https://www.coindesk.com/the-coronavirus-api-delivers-vital-statistics-unmediated-by-government-hands
It should be noted that states, territories and counties do not uniformly report Cov-19 data on their public health pages. Some do not report the number of tested or the number of deaths on the official state pages. Not all states list their county data, and press releases of some of the state and county numbers do not match the state publicly reported numbers on their pages. The initiative collects, sorts, and aggregates the disparate state and territory publicly reported numbers making them useful for HELPERS.
Next, the initiative would like to get the data into as many hands as possible; find support for building county by county data & adding more local data, and providing forecasting tools.
