Delphi's COVIDcast Project: Lessons from Building a Digital Ecosystem for Tracking and Forecasting the Pandemic

• Activity Number: 498 - Making Data and Statistics Impactful Through Inclusivity, Powerful Collaboration, and Effective Innovation
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Thursday, August 11, 2022 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Stats. Partnerships Among Academe Indust. & Govt. Committee
• Author(s): Ryan Tibshirani*
• Companies: Carnegie Mellon University
• Keywords: COVID-19; open science; signal processing; tracking; forecasting

Abstract

In March 2020, the Delphi group at Carnegie Mellon University launched an effort called COVIDcast, which has many parts: 1. unique relationships with partners in tech/healthcare granting us access to data on pandemic activity; 2. infrastructure to build real-time, geographically-detailed COVID-19 indicators from this data; 3. a historical database of all indicators, including revision tracking; 4. a public API serving new indicators daily (with R and Python client support); 5. interactive graphics to display our indicators; 6. forecasting and modeling work building on the indicators. This talk gives a high-level summary, with discussion of some lessons learned.