For those stuck at home, working and wanting to help, two data initiatives are seeking volunteers to track data for future planning.
The first, according to an article in Scientific American, is set to help researchers track the COVID-19 through community crowdsourced data that goes into a national map that updates constantly, showing exactly how the disease is progressing. “Capturing on-the-ground information in real time from the public really can give us a sense of what’s happening at the community level. And it also gives the public an opportunity to contribute back to public health,” Boston Children’s Hospital’s Kara Sewalk and program manager for COVID Near You told Scientific American. “This type of data will be useful in terms of predictive modeling of understanding where potential hotspots currently exist or could exist in the next few weeks to few months—to however long the outbreak continues.
Another call for volunteer data sources comes from a much older source. According to the BBC, the UK is looking for people to transfer handwritten rain records to spreadsheets. These handwritten records go back 200 years and can be used to plan for floods and droughts. “Water companies have to plan for a one-in-100 or one-in-500-year drought,” said Professor Hawkins of The Rainfall Reading Project to BBC News. “But we’ve only got 60 years of very dense digital data, and so it’s very hard for them to come up with reliable estimates. We know there are periods in the past that, if they happened again, would probably break the system. And the same is true for very heavy rainfall and floods.”
Source:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52040822
https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/help-researchers-track-covid-19/
