Blog by Andrew J. Zahuranec and Stefaan G. Verhulst: “The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a global health crisis the likes of which the modern world has never seen. Amid calls to action from the United Nations Secretary-General, the World Health Organization, and many national governments, there has been a proliferation of initiatives using data to address some facet of the pandemic. In March, The GovLab at NYU put out its own call to action, which identifies key steps organizations and decision-makers can take to build the data infrastructure needed to tackle pandemics. This call has been signed by over 400 data leaders from around the world in the public and private sector and in civil society.
But questions remain as to how many of these initiatives are useful for decision-makers. While The GovLab’s living repository contains over 160 data collaboratives, data competitions, and other innovative work, many of these examples take a data supply-side approach to the COVID-19 response. Given the urgency of the situation, some organizations create projects that align with the available data instead of trying to understand what insights those responding to the crisis actually want, including issues that may not be directly related to public health.
We need to identify and ask better questions to use data effectively in the current crisis. Part of that work means understanding what topics can be addressed through enhanced data access and analysis.
Using The GovLab’s rapid-research methodology, we’ve compiled a list of 12 topic areas related to COVID-19 where data and analysis is needed. …(More)”.
Common EU Toolbox for Member States by eHealth Network: “Mobile apps have potential to bolster contact tracing strategies to contain and reverse the spread of COVID-19. EU Member States are converging towards effective app solutions that minimise the processing of personal data, and recognise that interoperability between these apps can support public health authorities and support the reopening of the EU’s internal borders.
This first iteration of a common EU toolbox, developed urgently and collaboratively by the e-Health Network with the support of the European Commission, provides a practical guide for Member States. The common approach aims to exploit the latest privacy-enhancing technological solutions that enable at-risk individuals to be contacted and, if necessarily, to be tested as quickly as possible, regardless of where she is and the app she is using. It explains the essential requirements for national apps, namely that they be:
voluntary;
approved by the national health authority;
privacy-preserving – personal data is securely encrypted; and
dismantled as soon as no longer needed.
The added value of these apps is that they can record contacts that a person may not notice or remember. These requirements on how to record contacts and notify individuals are anchored in accepted epidemiological guidance, and reflect best practice on cybersecurity, and accessibility. They cover how to prevent the appearance of potentially harmful unapproved apps, success criteria and collectively monitoring the effectiveness of the apps, and the outline of a communications strategy to engage with stakeholders and the people affected by these initiatives.
Work will continue urgently to develop further and implement the toolbox, as set out in the Commission Recommendation of 8 April, including addressing other types of apps and the use of mobility data for modelling to understand the spread of the disease and exit from the crisis….(More)”.
MIT Sloan: “On February 19 in the Ukrainian town of Novi Sanzhary, alarm went up regarding the new coronavirus and COVID-19, the disease it causes. “50 infected people from China are being brought to our sanitarium,” began a widely read post on the messaging app Viber. “We can’t afford to let them destroy our population, we must prevent countless deaths. People, rise up. We all have children!!!”
Soon after came another message: “if we sleep this night, then we will wake up dead.”
As the director-general of the World Health Organization recently put it, “we’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic.”
Now a new study suggests that an “accuracy nudge” from social media networks could curtail the spread of misinformation about COVID-19. The working paper, from researchers at MIT Sloan and the University of Regina, examines how and why misinformation about COVID-19 spreads on social media. The researchers also examine a simple intervention that could slow this spread. (The paper builds on prior work about how misinformation diffuses online.)…(More)”.
Essay by Frank D. LoMonte at the Journal of Civic Information: “In an April 1 interview with NPR’s “Morning Edition,” retired U.S. Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, explained that, in a crisis situation, accurate information from government authorities can be crucial in reassuring the public – and in the absence of accurate information, speculation and rumor will proliferate. Joni Mitchell, who’s probably never before appeared in the same paragraph with Stanley McChrystal, might have put it a touch more poetically: “Don’t it always seem to go; That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.”
The outbreak of the coronavirus strain COVID-19, which prompted the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to declare a public health emergency on Jan. 31, 2020,3 is introducing Americans to a newfound world of austerity and loss. Professional haircuts, sit-down restaurant meals and recreational plane flights increasingly seem like memories from a bygone golden age (small inconveniences, to be sure, alongside the suffering of thousands who’ve died and the families they’ve left behind).
Access to information from government agencies, too, is adapting to a mail-order, drive-through society. As public-health authorities reached consensus that the spread of COVID-19 could be contained only by eliminating non-essential travel and group gatherings, strict adherence to open-meeting and public-records laws became a casualty alongside salad bars and theme-park rides. Governors and legislatures relaxed, or entirely waived, compliance with statutes that require agencies to open their meetings to in-person public attendance and promptly fulfill requests for documents.
As with all other areas of public life, some sacrifices in open-government formalities are unavoidable. With agencies down to a sustenance-level crew of essential workers, it’s unrealistic to expect that decades-old paper documents will be speedily located and produced. And it’s unsafe to invite people to congregate at public hearings to address their elected officials. But the public shouldn’t be alone in the sacrifice….(More)”.
Karen Hao at MIT Technology Review: “When it comes to predicting the spread of an infectious disease, it’s crucial to understand what Ryan Tibshirani, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, calls the “the pyramid of severity.” The bottom of the pyramid is asymptomatic carriers (those who have the infection but feel fine); the next level is symptomatic carriers (those who are feeling ill); then come hospitalizations, critical hospitalizations, and finally deaths.
Every level of the pyramid has a clear relationship to the next: “For example, sadly, it’s pretty predictable how many people will die once you know how many people are under critical care,” says Tibshirani, who is part of CMU’s Delphi research group, one of the best flu-forecasting teams in the US. The goal, therefore, is to have a clear measure of the lower levels of the pyramid, as the foundation for forecasting the higher ones.
But in the US, building such a model is a Herculean task. A lack of testing makes it impossible to assess the number of asymptomatic carriers. The results also don’t accurately reflect how many symptomatic carriers there are. Different counties have different testing requirements—some choosing only to test patients who require hospitalization. Test results also often take upwards of a week to return.
The remaining option is to measure symptomatic carriers through a large-scale, self-reported survey. But such an initiative won’t work unless it covers a big enough cross section of the entire population. Now the Delphi group, which has been working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help it coordinate the national pandemic response, has turned to the largest platforms in the US: Facebook and Google.
In a new partnership with Delphi, both tech giants have agreed to help gather data from those who voluntarily choose to report whether they’re experiencing covid-like symptoms. Facebook will target a fraction of their US users with a CMU-run survey, while Google has thus far been using its Opinion Rewards app, which lets users respond to questions for app store credit. The hope is this new information will allow the lab to produce county-by-county projections that will help policymakers allocate resources more effectively.
Neither company will ever actually see the survey results; they’re merely pointing users to the questions administered and processed by the lab. The lab will also never share any of the raw data back to either company. Still, the agreements represent a major deviation from typical data-sharing practices, which could raise privacy concerns. “If this wasn’t a pandemic, I don’t know that companies would want to take the risk of being associated with or asking directly for such a personal piece of information as health,” Tibshirani says.
Without such cooperation, the researchers would’ve been hard pressed to find the data anywhere else. Several other apps allow users to self-report symptoms, including a popular one in the UK known as the Covid Symptom Tracker that has been downloaded over 1.5 million times. But none of them offer the same systematic and expansive coverage as a Facebook or Google-administered survey, says Tibshirani. He hopes the project will collect millions of responses each week….(More)”.
EdgeCast by Toby Ord: “Lately, I’ve been asking myself questions about the future of humanity, not just about the next five years or even the next hundred years, but about everything humanity might be able to achieve in the time to come.
The past of humanity is about 200,000 years. That’s how long Homo sapiens have been around according to our current best guess (it might be a little bit longer). Maybe we should even include some of our other hominid ancestors and think about humanity somewhat more broadly. If we play our cards right, we could live hundreds of thousands of years more. In fact, there’s not much stopping us living millions of years. The typical species lives about a million years. Our 200,000 years so far would put us about in our adolescence, just old enough to be getting ourselves in trouble, but not wise enough to have thought through how we should act.
But a million years isn’t an upper bound for how long we could live. The horseshoe crab, for example, has lived for 450 million years so far. The Earth should remain habitable for at least that long. So, if we can survive as long as the horseshoe crab, we could have a future stretching millions of centuries from now. That’s millions of centuries of human progress, human achievement, and human flourishing. And if we could learn over that time how to reach out a little bit further into the cosmos to get to the planets around other stars, then we could have longer yet. If we went seven light-years at a time just making jumps of that distance, we could reach almost every star in the galaxy by continually spreading out from the new location. There are already plans in progress to send spacecraft these types of distances. If we could do that, the whole galaxy would open up to us….
Humanity is not a typical species. One of the things that most worries me is the way in which our technology might put us at risk. If we look back at the history of humanity these 2000 centuries, we see this initially gradual accumulation of knowledge and power. If you think back to the earliest humans, they weren’t that remarkable compared to the other species around them. An individual human is not that remarkable on the Savanna compared to a cheetah, or lion, or gazelle, but what set us apart was our ability to work together, to cooperate with other humans to form something greater than ourselves. It was teamwork, the ability to work together with those of us in the same tribe that let us expand to dozens of humans working together in cooperation. But much more important than that was our ability to cooperate across time, across the generations. By making small innovations and passing them on to our children, we were able to set a chain in motion wherein generations of people worked across time, slowly building up these innovations and technologies and accumulating power….(More)”.
Nic Fildes and Javier Espinoza at the Financial Times: “When the World Health Organization launched a 2007 initiative to eliminate malaria on Zanzibar, it turned to an unusual source to track the spread of the disease between the island and mainland Africa: mobile phones sold by Tanzania’s telecoms groups including Vodafone, the UK mobile operator.
Working together with researchers at Southampton university, Vodafone began compiling sets of location data from mobile phones in the areas where cases of the disease had been recorded.
Mapping how populations move between locations has proved invaluable in tracking and responding to epidemics. The Zanzibar project has been replicated by academics across the continent to monitor other deadly diseases, including Ebola in west Africa….
With much of Europe at a standstill as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, politicians want the telecoms operators to provide similar data from smartphones. Thierry Breton, the former chief executive of France Telecom who is now the European commissioner for the internal market, has called on operators to hand over aggregated location data to track how the virus is spreading and to identify spots where help is most needed.
Both politicians and the industry insist that the data sets will be “anonymised”, meaning that customers’ individual identities will be scrubbed out. Mr Breton told the Financial Times: “In no way are we going to track individuals. That’s absolutely not the case. We are talking about fully anonymised, aggregated data to anticipate the development of the pandemic.”
But the use of such data to track the virus has triggered fears of growing surveillance, including questions about how the data might be used once the crisis is over and whether such data sets are ever truly anonymous….(More)”.
Thirteen modules have been created by leading global experts in major disasters such as the post-election violence in Kenya in 2008, the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in 2011, the Ebola crisis in 2014, the Zika outbreak in 2016, and the current coronavirus. The course is designed to help those responding to coronavirus make use of volunteerism.
As the COVID-19 pandemic reaches unprecedented proportions and spreads to more than 150 countries on six continents, policymakers are struggling to answer questions such as “How do we predict how the virus will spread?,” “How do we help the elderly and the homebound?,” “How do we provide economic assistance to those affected by business closures?,” and more.
In each mini-lecture, those who have learned how to mobilize groups of people online to manage in a crisis present the basic concepts and tools to learn, analyze, and implement a crowdsourced public response. Lectures include
Introduction: Why Collective Intelligence Matters in a Crisis
Chatbots and Social Media Strategies for Crisis (led by Nashin Mahtani, PetaBencana.id, Indonesia)
Conclusion: Lessons Learned
The course explores such innovative uses of crowdsourcing as Safecast’s implementation of citizen science to gather information about environmental conditions after the meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear plant; Ushahidi, an online platform in Kenya for crowdsourcing data for crisis relief, human rights advocacy, transparency, and accountability campaigns; and “Ask a Scientist,” an interactive tool developed by The GovLab with the Federation of American Scientists and the New Jersey Office of Innovation, in which a network of scientists answer citizens’ questions about COVID-19.
Announcement: “To address the COVID-19 pandemic and other dynamic threats, The GovLab has called for the development of a new data infrastructure and ecosystem. Establishing data collaboratives in a responsible manner often necessitates the creation of data sharing agreements and other legal documentation — a strain on time and capacity both for data holders and those who could use data in the public interest.
Today, to support the development of data collaboratives in a responsible and agile way, we are sharing a new tool that addresses the complexity in preparing a Data Sharing Agreement from Contracts for Data Collaboration (a joint initiative of SDSN-TReNDS, the World Economic Forum, The GovLab, and the University of Washington’s Information Risk Research Initiative). Providing a checklist to support organizations with reviewing, negotiating and preparing Data Sharing Arrangements, the intent is to strengthen stakeholder trust and help accelerate responsible data sharing arrangements given the urgency of the global pandemic.
(Please note that the check list is a tool for formulating and understanding legal issues, but we are not offering it as legal advice.)
Drawing upon field-based research and established good practice, RD4C aims to highlight and support responsible handling of data for and about children; identify challenges and develop practical tools to assist practitioners in evaluating and addressing them; and encourage a broader discussion on actionable principles, insights, and approaches for responsible data management.
RD4C launched in October 2019 with the release of the RD4C Synthesis Report, Selected Readings, and the RD4C Principles: Purpose-Driven, People-Centric, Participatory, Protective of Children’s Rights, Proportional, Professionally Accountable, and Prevention of Harms Across the Data Lifecycle.
The RD4C Case Studies analyze data systems deployed in diverse country environments, with a focus on their alignment with the RD4C Principles. This week’s release includes case studies arising from field missions to Romania, Kenya, and Afghanistan in 2019. The data systems examined are:
