Dashboards and trackers: Covid-19 pandemic made data new normal

Data was described as ‘new oil’ some years ago, but the pandemic has put it in a different place altogether with dashboards and data trackers making sense of everything from the strains of Covid19 to the range of vaccines, from life to workplace and everything else. It’s the exponential rise of data that has powered Covid war-rooms all over the world including in India. While experts in the area have shared their enthusiasm about so much data, they have also brought out the gaps and inequalities around it.

Pointing at the phenomenal rise in data research and analytics, Dr Amita Gupta, faculty co-chair at Johns Hopkins India Institute and deputy director of Johns Hopkins Global Health Education, said at least half a million scientific papers have been published on Covid, besides more than 193,000 other types of papers related to the economic, scientific and social impact of the pandemic. Data research and analytics is valued more now than it was before the pandemic, according to Dr Gupta, who’s a US-based specialist in infectious diseases. ‘’During the pandemic, among many things that are unprecedented, data and data analytics added to that mix. There’s data flowing whichever way you look,’’ she said in an interaction with Business Standard.

Take for instance, CoWIN. The tech backbone for the Covid19 vaccination process has administered around 1.2 billion jabs so far. The attributes or the data points linked to the vaccine and the people who have been jabbed could run into several billions. ‘’If there are 10 attributes for every case of vaccination, we have at least 10 billion data points available to us for slicing and dicing,’’ according to RS Sharma, CEO of National Health Authority and CoWIN. The day when India did over 20 million vaccinations in September, the rate of inoculation was 1000 per second, he added to explain the quantum and speed of data generation.

MyGov, the government’s citizen engagement platform, too has seen an exponential increase in data during Covid. Among other things, it maintains a page dedicated to the pandemic. Recalling the early days of the pandemic, MyGov CEO Abhishek Singh said the Covid chapter on the Mygov site had started in February 2020. ‘’We were brainstorming about it and realized very little was known about Covid including what was meant by asymptomatic and what quarantine implied in this context. Things needed to be explained,’’ he said. A chatbot was also set up on Whatsapp in March 2020 for easy access, and in ten days some 10 million users came on to the platform, according to Singh.

Surveys during the pandemic also hit a high. LocalCircles is one such organisation which has conducted a survey once in three or four days throughout the pandemic. Sachin Taparia, chairman and CEO of LocalCircles, put the figure of surveys at 200 plus since Covid19 surfaced. Pre-pandemic, the number was at half of this level, according to Taparia. ‘’We raised issues with the government before they actually became issues,’’ he said.      

There’s tremendous value of the high-frequency data coming mostly from the government during the pandemic, chief economist at the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) Bidisha Ganguly said. When asked to compare data generation and analysis with other countries, she said,  ‘’in general, western nations have much richer data.’’ Citing the example of unemployment, she said weekly data is given in many countries unlike in India. ‘’In India, it’s also difficult because large number of jobs are in the informal sector.

Dr Gupta of Johns Hopkins also pointed at the other side of data. While elaborating on how the data revolution has helped in decision making, she said the challenge is in figuring out what’s quality data. Referring to ‘democratisation’ of data, she said one has to look out for what’s reliable. She said, ‘’I think LMIC (low to middle income) countries such as India have lagged behind in collecting, presenting and sharing their data. Lack of reliable numbers to accurately portray the Covid19 pandemic may result in the dangerous equation ‘’no data is equal to no problem,’’ she said.

Also, data has revealed inequalities. As Dr Gupta pointed out, female authors trailed behind growth from male authors across all subject areas, possible because women shouldered the burden of childcare and home-schooling during lockdowns. As for the future of data, her answer is: ‘’with the pandemic hitting government budgets, funding will be the main factor that steers where research goes in the future.’’