This first of its kind, open-access, global case data repository will enable informed public health decision making to tackle COVID-19, and to track its variants and future infectious diseases.
Global.health builds on an idea first initiated by University of Oxford researchers in January 2020, to build a COVID-19 database which pulls together anonymised data on as many individual cases as possible. Following early investment by the Oxford Martin School at the start of the pandemic, Google.org provided funding and a team of 10 fulltime Google.org Fellows and 7 part-time Google.org volunteers to scale up the project to a massive, open resource of verified case-level data from around the world. The Rockefeller Foundation has also provided funding to broaden the scope and scale of Global.health as an open data platform for digital epidemiology.