About Us
We are an interdisciplinary coalition hosted by the American Family Insurance Data Science Institute, with partners from UW-Madison, local and state government, industry, and other academic institutions curating information as fast as we can.
There is an urgent need to develop models that can inform policy makers, as well as the general public, in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has issued a call to action for tech and AI experts to develop new text and data mining techniques to help answer high-priority scientific questions related to COVID-19. We are committed to sharing our own data models and visualizations, as well as those shared by other institutions and news organizations.
Read more about our goals for interpreting, modeling and messaging data in our COVID-19 Data Research Charter.
Going the Distance Together
We’re working to provide results, but raw data and model assumptions are evolving quickly, changing without notice. The COVID-19 pandemic is a complex medical and sociological event: data have biases that make interpretation tricky, and models are limited by assumptions and data. That said, we know physical distancing (also labeled social distancing) makes a difference. COVID-19 cases are continuing to climb. If we all do our part and stay apart, we can go the distance together. Be positive, stay negative.
Learn more about how UW-Madison is supporting public health and the people of Wisconsin during this pandemic at the UW-Madison COVID-19 Impact site.
Local and Regional Data Visualizations
- Madison Area COVID-19 Pandemic Dashboard (UW-Madison Department of Geography)
- Smart Restart Data Dashboard (UW-Madison)
- Dane County COVID-19 Dashboard (Public Health Madison-Dane County)
- Wisconsin COVID-19 Status (Space Science Engineering Center)
- Milwaukee County COVID-19 Dashboard
- Coronavirus in Wisconsin: How Fast it’s Growing (The Instantaneous R0 Visualization won honorable mention in the SciPy Plotting Contest)
- Wisconsin Hospital Association COVID-19 Situational Awareness Update
- Visualizations of Movement in Wisconsin (GeoDS Lab @ UW-Madison)
- DHS COVID WI Model
- UW COSMOS COVID-19 Project: Literature Search
- Percent of Adults Aged 18-85 in Dane County With Two or More Risk Factors for Severe Complications of COVID-19 by ZIP Code (Health Innovations Program)
Data Repositories and Code Resources
- COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19)
- CHIME repository
- MIDAS Portal for Modeling COVID-19
- Avi Schiffman’s nCoV2019 repository
- Johns Hopkins CSSE COVID-19 Data Repository
- Data Science for COVID-19 in South Korea
- Italy COVID-19 data repository
- Top 5 R Resources for COVID-19 Data
- Open Source COVID-19: list of open-source projects
- WorldOMeters
- Covid Tracking Project
- SARS-CoV-2 Open Research Portal
National and Global Data Visualizations and Reports
- ESRI CovidPulse: United States novel coronavirus trend lines, since February (John Hopkins University and ESRI)
- COVID-19 Projections Using Machine Learning
- A National Plan to Enable Comprehensive COVID-19 Case Finding and Contact Tracing in the US (Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health)
- U.S. COVID-19 Atlas (University of Chicago Spatial Data Center)
- HealthMap (Boston Children’s Hospital)
- Google COVID Mobility Reports
- COVID-19 Community Mobility
- Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count (The New York Times)
- Coronavirus in the U.S. and Canada (1.3Acres)
- COVID Act Now
- Covid Tracking Project
- Comparing Spread in the U.S. and Globally
- COVID-19 Global Cases (Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering)
- Global Infection Trends (University of Washington)
- Pandemic Cases app (Brian Yandell, UW-Madison)
- COVID-19 Trends (University of Virginia)
- nCoV2019 Dashboard
Funding opportunities
MIDAS Network: Funding announcements for COVID-19 modeling research
School of Medicine and Public Health:
- Funding opportunities related to COVID-19 (includes information on dealing with grant interruptions and delays due to COVID)
- Wisconsin Partnership Program announces $2.2 million in grants in response to COVID-19
Research and Sponsored Programs: COVID-19 updates related to sponsored programs
InfoEd Global: COVID-19 research-related funding opportunties
Data Science Stories
Understanding a global pandemic requires creating community around studying it and making any discovery understandable for the public. It’s an aim of our group, and other collaborative efforts around understanding the effects of COVID-19 are popping up around the world.
Media stories highlighting the contributions of our team members
- Everybody poops, some shed the virus that causes COVID-19. Wisconsin’s wastewater surveillance is looking for it. University Communications, 8 September 2020.
- ‘It’s just not surprising,’ Epidemiology expert expects most COVID deaths to have underlying causes. WKOW News, 31 August 2020.
- Q&A: UW’s Jonathan Temte on status of a coronavirus vaccine and how it will be distributed. Capital Times, 2 August 2020.
- Q&A: Malia Jones discusses returning to school as pandemic continues. Capital Times, 26 July 2020.
- US prisons are an experiment that lets COVID-19 run wild. Science Friday, 31 July 2020.
- A Coalition of Scientists Takes on COVID-19 — with Data. Grow Magazine, Summer 2020.
- Q&A: Ajay Sethi dispels COVID-19 conspiracies. Capital Times, 10 May 2020.
- Five people. One test. This is how you get there. New York Times, 7 May 2020.
- Dr. Malia Jones’s public outreach on COVID-19 is documented in the Applied Population Laboratory’s publications archive.
- Why climate change can lead to more pandemics. Wisconsin Public Radio, 22 April 2020.
- Researchers at UW-Madison lead data science coalition to aid with COVID-19. University Communications, 21 April 2020.
- UW-Madison engineer works with local health leaders to develop COVID-19 prediction models. University Communications, 17 April 2020.
- UW-Madison researchers tracking travel, social media to help contain virus. University Communications, 13 April 2020.
- Reason for hope against the novel coronavirus. Wisconsin State Journal, 3 April 2020.
Webinars and presentations
- Crossroads of Ideas: COVID-19 edition, part 2 (59 min). 20 April 2020.
- Nelson Institute Virtual 2020 Earth Day Conference: Transmission and transitions: How climate change is impacting human and planetary health (60 minutes). 20 April 2020.
- Crossroads of Ideas: COVID-19 edition, part 1 (59 min). 14 April 2020.
- UW-Madison MPH Program Webinar: COVID-19: Being an effective opinion leader (56 min). 31 March 2020.
- The UW Now Livestream includes faculty presentations on COVID-19 research in its weekly lineup of programs.
Other resources
- Art and the coronavirus. UW-Madison Global Health Institute
- Wisconsin Do Your Part: YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Coloring Book.
- The American Statistical Association (ASA) has created the COVID-19 Data, Statistics, and Research and Discussion group.
- MIDAS is looking to grow its community of data scientists interested in COVID-19 modeling research.
Data science can contribute to helping the world navigate and understand how to mitigate this pandemic. We’re featuring some stories that highlight data science’s role in prevention, mitigation, and relief efforts.
- Starting around 15 years ago, Neil Ferguson developed pandemic models for influenza, and recently developed an agent-based continuous time model for COVID-19 that influenced action in the U.S. and the U.K.
- Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now, features data from the spread of this pandemic, and covers the handling of public health crises since the Spanish Influenza of 1918.
- Some Cities Could Have Coronavirus Outbreaks Worse than Wuhan’s
- Democracy Now! interviewed Avi Schiffman, the creator of the nCoV2019.live
- Caltech scientists examine COVID-19 by the numbers
- Social distancing “flattened the curve” in 1918, too
- Covid-19 in India: A data-centric summary
- FiveThirtyEight: A comic strip tour of the wild world of pandemic modeling