Last updated: March 25, 00:15 UTC

Resources about the current state

• WHO reports (PDF, world-wide)
• [GERMAN] Number of confirmed cases as HTTP/JSON API
• [GERMAN] Number of confirmed cases (published by RKI, can be about ~1-2 days behind)
• [GERMAN] Number of confirmed cases (published by zeit.de, more fresh, but also still delayed)
• RKI reports (PDF, situation in Germany, published once per day by RKI in English and German)
• ECDC report (European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, word-wide)
• Official Italian reports
• [USA] CSBS information portal
• Curated git repository with data from Italy and a map showing the time-evolution of the spread in Italy (we need a repo like this for Germany!).
• [GERMAN] Current recommendations for COVID-19 therapy (published by Robert Koch-Institut)

Datasets

• https://github.com/jgehrcke/covid-19-germany-gae (COVID-19 case numbers in Germany by state, over time)
• [USA] The COVID Tracking Project about the state of testing in the U.S.
• coronadatascraper.com
• CSSEGISandData/COVID-19 on GitHub, the most popular aggregated data set maintained by the Johns Hopkins University — the collaboration on this repository is pleasing. Certain details should rather be obtained from local authorities if decent precision is needed. Also, updates are a little hard to follow.
• Our World in Data curated corrections to WHO Situation Reports, and the corresponding curated “full dataset” (CSV)

Curated list of dashboards and visualizations

These are not all the things. That is not the goal, that is supposed to be a curated list. I found that these are some of the best (in terms of clarity, information content, data freshness, uniqueness, the organizations or people behind them, …):

• world-wide: University Virginia Biocomplexity Institute (world-wide, time evolution, I like the clarity)
• world-wide: https://hgis.uw.edu/virus/
• wonderful overview, also for explicit re-using, certainly a good resource for the coming weeks: https://blog.datawrapper.de/coronaviruscharts/
• Germany: ESRI ArcGIS dashboard (data: RKI), corresponding announcement
• Italy: ESRI ArcGIS board (data: Italian Civil Protection, authors: UN)
• USA: CSBS map
• https://covid19dashboards.com/
• world-wide: double-logarithmic fatality rate per country/region, comparison to other diseases
• Hong Kong: Fine-grained insights
• Germany: exponential or not? (exponential fit to Germany’s confirmed infection count)
• https://github.com/r-lomba/covid-19-charts and the corresponding https://r-lomba.github.io/covid-19-charts/charts

Valuable background information

You’d like to understand things? You’d like to listen to researches talk about the topic?

• http://www.microbe.tv/twiv/ — this is gold. Hear Vincent Racaniello, Stephen Morse, Ralph Baric, and others discuss the facts, as close to the truth (in a humble way) as it gets.
• Sciencedirect articles about SARS-CoV-2, sorted by date, most are open access
• [GERMAN] Podcast-Serie mit Christian Drosten
• WHO Covid-19 myth busters
• Summary about outbreaks of coronavirus-related diseases (Wikipedia)
• Virology Lectures 2020 #1: What is a Virus? (Prof. Vincent Racaniello, first lecture of his 2020 Columbia University virology course — highly insightful, he comments on SARS-CoV-2, subsequent lecture series parts are also great)

How the open data community approaches this topic

It’s so cool to see how the scientific community approaches this topic in a truly collaborative fashion. Some things I enjoyed seeing:

• https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.21.959973v2
• https://github.com/galaxyproject/SARS-CoV-2
• Lovely discussion resulting on a collaboration in a Google Sheets spreadsheet based on John Hopkins data
• Feedback by a large number of individuals in the CSSEGISandData/COVID-19 repository. The value of this is not to be underestimated. Examples:
  • https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/issues/669
  • https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/issues/676
  • https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/issues/682
• SEIR model applied to outbreak data in Germany on GitHub
• Lovely data analysis and discussion: COVID-19 epidemiology with R

Terminology

• A coronavirus is a virus from a well-known family of viruses (discovered in the 1960s). The name is derived from the structural appearance (the 3D shape) that these viruses have.
• SARS-CoV-2 is the name for the new, currently spreading, virus. It is a special kind of coronavirus. Its name is an abbreviation for “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2”.
• COVID-19 is the currently established name for the infectious respiratory disease caused by the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.

These names are official as of this WHO announcement.

Other resources

• Decent study on incubation time of COVID-19 (min ~2 days, mean: 5 days, max: 2 weeks)
• Announcements made by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control

• COVID-19 and Italy: what next? a scientific publication about the developments in Italy, published on March 13. A great read.