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.
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 has issued an Executive Order that includes the gathering, sharing, and publication of COVID-19 data “to facilitate informed community decision-making, to further public understanding of the pandemic and the response, and to deter the spread of misinformation and disinformation.” We are committed to sharing our own data models and visualizations, as well as those shared by other institutions and news organizations. Use the menu at the right to explore models curated locally and globally, and to read stories highlighting the work of our community.
The work of our group has shifted from model projections to advising teams on the best use of data, including:
University Health Services (UHS) monitoring of high-volume campus COVID-19 testing: Advise UHS on analysis and visualization of testing results, as well as automated detection of campus (super)spreader events using Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Passive surveillance of COVID-19 on campus and in the community: Measure WIFI density and proximity of mobile devices in campus buildings, and monitor wastewater for COVID signals at the Lakeshore and Sellery dorms on campus and at five regions across Madison. Our collaboration with the State Lab of Hygiene on wastewater surveillance extends to measurements across the state, and to detection of COVID-19 variants.
Wisconsin vaccination distribution logistics with DHS and National Guard: Develop optimization models for scheduling weekly vaccine distribution and identify ways to assess the fairness of these models for underrepresented populations and geographies
Read more about our goals for interpreting, modeling and messaging data in our COVID-19 Data Research Charter.
Going the Distance Together
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 mitigation strategies including masking and physical distancing (also labeled social distancing) make a difference. 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)
- COVID-19 Response Data Dashboard (UW-Madison)
- Dane County COVID-19 Dashboard (Public Health Madison-Dane County)
- Milwaukee County COVID-19 Dashboard
- Wisconsin Department of Health Services COVID-19 Dashboards: Disease Activity by Region and County and Hospital Capacity by Region
- 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)
- UW COSMOS COVID-19 Project: Literature Search
- COVID-19 Relative Mortality Risk Interactive Maps (Health Innovations Program)
Data Repositories and Code Resources
- COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19)
- CHIME repository
- MIDAS Portal for Modeling COVID-19
- Johns Hopkins CSSE COVID-19 Data Repository
- Jihoo Kim’s Data Science for COVID-19 (South Korea)
- Italy COVID-19 data repository
- Top 100 R Resources on Novel COVID-19 Coronavirus
- Open Source COVID-19: list of open-source projects
- WorldOMeters
- SARS-CoV-2 Open Research Portal
National and Global Data Visualizations and Reports
- COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool (Georgia Institute of Technology)
- ESRI CovidPulse: United States novel coronavirus trend lines, since March (John Hopkins University and ESRI)
- 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 Atlas (University of Chicago Spatial Data Center)
- HealthMap
- Google COVID Mobility Reports
- COVID-19 Community Mobility Country Comparison
- Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count (The New York Times)
- U.S. COVID Risk and Vaccine Tracker (COVID Act Now)
- An interactive visualization of the exponential spread of COVID-19 (91-DIVOC)
- COVID-19 Global Cases (Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering)
- COVID-19 Surveillance Dashboard (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)
Research and Sponsored Programs: COVID-19 updates related to sponsored programs
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 and journal articles highlighting the contributions of our team members
- (2021). Dimensions of uncertainty: a spatiotemporal review of five COVID-19 datasets. Cartography and Geographic Information Science, DOI: 10.1080/15230406.2021.1975311.
- UW-Madison dorm outbreaks didn’t spill over into the community, new study finds. Spectrum News 1, 4 June 2021.
- Take your data science collaborations to the next level with RStudio Team. DoIT Cyberinfrastructure Group, 11 February 2021.
- Q&A: Malia Jones on in-person school decisions as vaccine arrives, pandemic continues. Cap Times, 29 December 2020.
- COVID-19 model quantifies impact of region-specific social distancing orders. University Communications, 26 October 2020.
- 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
- Badger Talks: Is Herd Immunity Attainable? 5 May 2021.
- Crossroads of Ideas: Getting Wisconsin Vaccinated (60 min). 24 March 2021.
- American Family Insurance Visiting Professor Series: Using Optimization in Planning Problems: A Covid Case (vaccination delivery) (55 min). 7 January 2021.
- 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.
- Four Ways to Measure Coronavirus Outbreaks in U.S. Metro Areas
- 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