Google has made its mark in the Corona pandemic, as the U.S. global corporation has co-sponsored an international database of scientific questions and answers about Covid 19 disease and its spread to help make issues associated with the pandemic more understandable. The Rockefeller Foundation is among the supporters of the project, which was initially initiated individually and then became a behemoth.
Data sets from 24 million Covid 19 patients have thus been compiled since the beginning of 2020. The data comes from 150 countries. Germany, for example, has now added 2.26 million records to the database by age, gender and date of first symptoms, so that better monitoring of coronavirus variants and their associated vaccines will be possible in the future. France, on the other hand, has not yet participated in the Giga project at all. Twenty-one scientists from the U.S. and Europe, including researchers from Harvard and Oxford Universities, Boston Children’s Hospital, and the John Hopkins Center for Healthy Security, are ensuring that the data from the data science initiative are entered anonymously into the huge international database. The focus is on compliance with privacy guidelines and standardization of data collection. The Global Health database is accessible to everyone. According to the experts, however, it is not possible to identify individual patients.
Up to 40 variables per Covid 19 case can be stored, which also include data sets on the mobility and movement of the sufferers. The Google supporters pay particular attention to a standardized format that avoids duplicate entries, for example, because the cloud-based system works with an algorithm. Initially, the data was listed in a simple Google table. When 100,000 records were exceeded, epidemiologists enlisted support and help from Google and Google.org. With the help of the phenomenally fast-growing database, experts from many countries are trying to get an accurate and complete picture of the pandemic and its impact, which also helps national health authorities. They are also looking at other diseases that may pose a threat to the world’s population in the future, similar to the Corona pandemic.
Source: Pharmazeutische-Zeitung