Pandemic Data Room

The Pandemic Data Room is a comprehensive global COVID-19 data repository led by QED Group to improve the understanding of the impact of physical distancing policies on social behavior, disease rates, hospital utilization, and local/national economies.

We aim to bring amazing talent to work on the data and develop insights that can benefit the global community’s work to understand and control the spread of this pandemic. Through the Pandemic Data Room, participants will have access to a unique compilation of data from a wide variety of public sources plus original behavioral surveys and social media compilations. Additionally, QED has partnered with incredible organizations, including Georgetown University, Medstar, Amazon, University of Virginia, University of Arkansas, AAU Ethiopia, Makerere University, Delhi University, Tableau and others, to ensure this initiative brings amazing talent to these robust resources.

These partners hosted the first Data Challenge April 13 through May 3, 2020, to inspire data scientists, economists, global health experts, and others to crowdsource data analysis and create visualization tools to generate insights that could lead to a better understanding of the impact of physical distancing and the outbreak. Winning entries will be selected from the more than 90 submissions and announced May 12, 2020.

There are several high-profile judges involved that have graciously agreed to lend their expertise to this first Data Challenge:

  • Elaine Johnson, acting director of the Office of Health Informatics at FDA
  • Ron Klain, former Chief of Staff to Vice President Biden and now Executive VP at Revolution
  • Susan Gregurick, head of data science at NIH
  • Gordon Weynand with the U.S. State Department
  • Alexis Bonnell, Chief Innovation Officer at USAID
  • Jeff Coyler, former Governor of Kansas
  • Tom Wotoki Director of Data Analysis and Applied Statistics at Virginia Tech
  • Juli Klemm, acting chief of Cancer Informatics Branch at Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology

In order that the Pandemic Data Room best reflects questions being asked among the global health and international development communities, we have created a portal where people can pose questions on COVID-19 they are looking to get answered. This question portal will be available to Data Challenge participants and they can use it to generate ideas in creating compelling visualization and analysis tools. Please visit the portal here.

Both students and professionals are encouraged to participate using the  COVID-19 Data Challenge data resource. For each track, submissions are judged separately and prizes (1st Place $2000, 2nd Place $1500, 3rd Place $1000, Honorable Mentions $100) are awarded.

Contribute to the Pandemic Data Room by submitting a new data source request in this Google Form. We will evaluate your data source and get back to you soon!

For more information on the Pandemic Data Room and Data Challenge, go to .


Update: We are proud to announce the winners of the Pandemic Data Challenge! We received numerous submissions from several different countries. We would like to thank you for your participation and support.

Winners in the Professional Track:

  • 1st place — John Bohannon, Primer AI, San Francisco, CA
  • 2nd place — Arti Ramdhanie, University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago, created a visualization that includes maps and tables that explore COVID-19 in the Caribbean.
  • 3rd place — Oscar Porras, Jr., MOHS ANALYTICS, Philippines, developed a dashboard that explores growth of cases in the U.S. overall and by state in relation to implementation of stay-at home orders. It also illustrates the availability of hospital beds by state.

Winners in the Student Track:

  • 1st place — Carl Romer and Shawn Meepagala, Howard University
  • 2nd place — Daniel Valderrama-Gonzalez, Georgetown University, developed a map that illustrates changing mobility trends in the United States since March 4 as well as differences in ability to socially distance by race, income level, and profession.
  • 3rd place — Beixuan Jia, Luwei Lei, Miao Wang, and Yuxin Zhang, Georgetown University, created a series of visualizations and interactive features that illustrate the impact and reaction to COVID-19.