MIT News – Kim Martineau | MIT Quest for Intelligence – July 1, 2020

Uncertainty about the course of the Covid-19 pandemic continues, with more than 2,500,000 known cases and 126,000 deaths in the United States alone. How to contain the virus, limit its damage, and address the deep-rooted health and racial inequalities it has exposed are now urgent topics for policymakers. Earlier this spring, 300 data scientists and health care professionals from around the world joined the MIT Covid-19 Datathon to see what insights they might uncover.

“It felt important to be a part of,” says Ashley O’Donoghue, an economist at the Center for Healthcare Delivery Science at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “We thought we could produce something that might make a difference.”

Participants were free to explore five tracks: the epidemiology of Covid-19, its policy impacts, its disparate health outcomes, the pandemic response in New York City, and the wave of misinformation Covid-19 has spawned. After splitting into teams, participants were set loose on 20 datasets, ranging from county-level Covid-19 cases compiled by The New York Times to a firehose of pandemic-related posts released by Twitter.