On the Dot: The G.h Newsletter
Data API 1.0, New Geospatial Visualizations, International Partners, and More
Welcome to the first 2022 issue of On The Dot: The Global.health Newsletter. We hope this edition finds you and yours healthy while our collective effort to quell the COVID-19 pandemic enters another year. We are humbled to support the life-saving work of the international research and public health communities and are excited to share several updates on the G.h platform, dataset, and consortium.
G.h in the News
Global.health Co-Founder Moritz Kraemer was named one of Google.org’s Nonprofit Leaders to Watch in 2022. Read more about the inspiration for G.h and plans for the future in this Q&A. We’re honored to have our work, team, and impact recognized by our partners at Google alongside so many other inspiring leaders and projects. Congrats Moritz!
Global.health Co-Founder Rebecca Katz spoke with The Washington Post on the importance of trust between citizens and government on pandemic preparedness.
Several members of the Global.health consortium contributed to new research published in Nature on the detection and spread of the Omicron variant in South Africa.
Database and Product Updates
Since launching with 5 million cases just over a year ago, the G.h database has scaled to over 90 million de-identified COVID-19 line-list cases from over 100 countries. Notable recent additions include up-to-date ingestion of all available case data from the USA, Taiwan, Estonia, Hong Kong, Argentina, Colombia, New Zealand, Germany, Czech Republic, Scotland, Mexico, and Brazil (including vaccination status).
Data API: We’re thrilled to unveil the first version of one of our most requested features: programmatic access to our line-list database through R and Python. Any registered user can generate an API key to explore and extract data natively within your research workflow. Documentation and instructions are available on GitHub. We’ll be adding more capabilities regularly, and feedback is always welcome.
Filtered Downloads: In addition to downloading the full G.h dataset, you can now apply filters (through our Map and Data web apps or the API) and generate a download file with the filtered data in the format of your preference (CSV, TSV, or JSON).
Updated Coverage Map: The Coverage View of the G.h Map now includes a dropdown to visualize the completeness percentage of every field in our schema by country. We’ve also rebuilt our entire map application with React to improve responsiveness and enable more enhancements in the future. Clicking on a country or region in any view also now displays the latest date of ingestion:
Full release notes and changelogs are available on our GitHub.
Partnership Updates
We’re excited to announce our first-ever data partnership with the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX), an initiative of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The first countries featured on the Global.health Partner Page as part of HDX’s COVID-19 Pandemic Dataset include Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, with more data and countries to be added in the future.
A warm welcome to The Gorgas Memorial Institute for Health Studies in Panama as the newest member organization of the Global.health consortium! In the coming months, we look forward to collaborating with our new colleagues to pilot exciting new product innovations and research initiatives. Stay tuned for more soon.
Support for Ukraine
Like so many, we are deeply saddened and troubled by the conflict in Ukraine. In addition to many of our own Ukrainian friends and collaborators, several members of our Global.health team are based in Poland with Ukrainian colleagues. We’ve compiled below a list of charitable organizations with proven track records in disaster and humanitarian response currently active in the region. For those with the means to do so, we encourage you to contribute. We will also be changing our social media logos to the national colors of Ukraine for the month of March to show our solidarity and support.
Until the next edition,
The G.h Team