CovidNet: To Bring Data Transparency in the Era of COVID-19

Timely, creditable, and fine-granular case information is vital for local communities and individual citizens to make rational and data-driven responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper presents CovidNet, a COVID-19 tracking project associated with a large scale epidemic dataset, which was initiated by 1Point3Acres. To the best of our knowledge, the project is the only platform providing real-time global case information of more than 4,124 sub-divisions from over 27 countries worldwide with multi-language supports. The platform also offers interactive visualization tools to analyze the full historical case curves in each region. Initially launched as a voluntary project to bridge the data transparency gap in North America in January 2020, this project by far has become one of the major independent sources worldwide and has been consumed by many other tracking platforms. The accuracy and freshness of the dataset is a result of the painstaking efforts from our voluntary teamwork, crowd-sourcing channels, and automated data pipelines. As of May 18, 2020, the project website has been visited more than 200 million times and the CovidNet dataset has empowered over 522 institutions and organizations worldwide in policy-making and academic researches. All datasets are openly accessible for non-commercial purposes at https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com via a formal request through our APIs.