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Co-developed by researchers and engineers at the Department of Biology, University of Oxford and Boston Children’s Hospital, USA, Global.health enables access to real-time, anonymized health data on infectious disease outbreaks, for the first time. The G.h database already holds over 100 million detailed, verified, harmonized, and de-identified SARS-CoV-2 case records from more than 130 countries: the most comprehensive repository of COVID-19 data in the world.
Dr Moritz Kraemer, Co-Founder of Global.health and Associate Professor at the Department of Biology, University of Oxford, commented: ‘Global.health's mission is to organize the world’s infectious disease data to enable more rapid responses to them. So far we have been focused on the initial phase of disease outbreaks, such as COVID-19 and monkeypox, and we will now be able to broaden our international partnerships and build our analytical tools to improve wider outbreak detection and response.’
What began as a volunteer-driven data science project at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Global.health has grown into a scalable and flexible data platform that sets a new standard for open, granular, and standardized case data. This information will be a vital resource for epidemiologists and public health leaders to model and mitigate the spread of emerging infectious diseases.