During the Covid-19 pandemic, members of the scientific community, doctors, researchers and administrators, among others, relied heavily on data to chart the course of the tricky virus and its trail of infection.
And a popular single source destination for such data was www.covid19india.org, a volunteer-driven crowd-sourced resource. However, they bid adieu and shut-shop on October 31. In fact, their last tweet on Monday said, “The last updates are in. It’s a wrap from us.”
While this initiative shuts down, a similar resource is getting back online, powered by another group. Three premier academic institutions – Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, Indian Institute of Science and Indian Statistical Institute – are collaborating with the Bengaluru-based Semantic Web India and are set to continue providing Covid-19 data, but as “www.incovid19.org”.
Volunteer-run service
The original Covid-tracking site has been running for 18 months, with over 300 volunteers collecting and synchronising data related to Covid-19 involving daily new infections, deaths, tests conducted, recovery, active cases etc. from all States and districts, displayed in a user-friendly manner. The website received over 4.4 billion visits as it became a key public repository of Covid-19 data, despite not being run by a government or being a funded organisation.
“All powered by the goodwill of a collective that came together and stuck together for the greater good,” is how the operators of this platform explained it while announcing the suspension of operations in August 2021.
Udit Bhatia, an Assistant Professor at Indian Institute of Technology – Gandhinagar, who led a team of researchers to develop a dashboard to provide epidemiological scenario-specific information at a city-scale, said, “Covid19India.org was the backbone of our dashboard. We developed network science-based compartmentalised model, which gives the estimate of susceptible population, exposed population, infected population etc. That was the only website where we got these observations on a scale required for our models.”
Pointing out its importance for credible science, Bhatia told BusinessLine, “The more data we would have, the more robust would be our estimates of uncertainties and projections. Without having these data sets, it would be just shooting in the dark.”
The older site sourced its data from multiple government sources and public platforms, but its popularity was in putting it under one roof. Jayesh Lele, Secretary General at Indian Medical Association (IMA) said, “The government is the ideal body to maintain and ensure the authenticity of data… considering the huge data sets being generated by the States. But the parameters of the data should be fixed by the Centre to maintain the uniformity in the reporting and States should adhere to these parameters for dissemination.”
“We keep a close watch on the health bulletin released every evening by the State government. However, that doesn’t give specific data on tests, changes in active cases, positivity rate etc. We could easily get these data for our specific districts and stay alert or make others alert in case of any rising trend,” said a government doctor in the Rajkot district of Gujarat.
New avatar
The new initiative would ensure the availability of data on Covid-19 pertaining to confirmed cases, active, recovered, deceased and tested for all the 36 States and Union Territories, until March 2022, said a note from IIT Madras.
Professor V Kamakoti, Associate Dean (Industrial Consultancy and Sponsored Research), IIT Madras, said, www.covid19india.org was providing a valuable service by making this data publicly available in one place, which was important to understand the pandemic.
DrAsha Subramanian, Founder and CEO, Semantic Web India, added, “The new portal www.incovid19.org will continue the efforts of the current Covid-19 India portal with historical and newly collated data from diverse sources. Beyond this, the project also envisages creation of a semantic layer on the data to provide enhanced search and analysis.”
