This collaborative effort by researchers at a number of universities endeavors to create a centralized database of Covid-19-related datasets:
The COVID-19 outbreak is a global pandemic declared by the World Health Organization (WHO), with rapidly increasing cases in most countries. A wide range of research is urgently needed for understanding the COVID-19 pandemic, such as transmissibility, geographic spreading, risk factors for infections, and economic impacts. Reliable data archive and sharing are essential to jumpstart innovative research to combat covid-19. This research is a collaborative and innovative effort in building such an archive, including the collection of a variety of data resources relevant to COVID-19 research, such as daily cases, social media, population mobility, health facilities, climate, socioeconomic data, and global news. Due to the heterogeneity between data sources, our effort also includes processing and integrating different datasets based on GIS base maps to make them relatable and comparable. To keep the data files permanent, we published all open data to the Harvard Dataverse which is an online data management and sharing platform with a permanent DOI number for each dataset. Finally, preliminary studies are conducted based on the shared COVID-19 datasets and revealed different spatial transmission patterns among mainland China, Italy, and the United States.