Google Makes COVID-19 Datasets Freely Available to Researchers

Google is offering researchers free access to critical coronavirus information through its COVID-19 Public Dataset Program, which will help accelerate analytics solutions during the global pandemic. The program will make a hosted repository of public datasets free to access and query, including the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CSSE) dashboard, Global Health Data from the World Bank, and OpenStreetMap data. Researchers will also be able to use BigQuery ML to train machine learning models at no additional cost. Data always plays a critical role in the ability to research, study, and combat public health emergencies, and nowhere is this more true than in the case of a global crisis,” Chad W. Jennings, BigQuery product manager and GIS lead, and Shane Glass, developer advocate, wrote in a blog post. These datasets will remove barriers for research and provide access to crucial information quickly and easily, removing the need to search for and onboard large data files. Research teams can access the datasets within the Google Cloud Console, along with a description of the data and sample queries to advance research.