---
id: "coronavirus-smarter-crowdsourcing:strategies/Make-raw-data-available-to-researchers,public-heal"
type: "GovLab policy strategy"
title: "Make raw data available to researchers,public health professionals and epidemiologists."
url: "https://coronavirus.smartercrowdsourcing.org/strategies/make-raw-data-available-to-researchers,public-heal"
summary: "Make raw data available to researchers,public health professionals and epidemiologists. Governments should make disaggregated and,where appropriate,raw data available for modeling and epidemiological analysis. Sharing key process and outcome data with demographic and geographic identifiers allows researchers and public health officials to better predict and respond to the spread of the virus and emerging outbreaks."
source: "The GovLab (coronavirus.smartercrowdsourcing.org)"
licence: "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)"
---

# Make raw data available to researchers,public health professionals and epidemiologists.

Make raw data available to researchers,public health professionals and epidemiologists. Governments should make disaggregated and,where appropriate,raw data available for modeling and epidemiological analysis. Sharing key process and outcome data with demographic and geographic identifiers allows researchers and public health officials to better predict and respond to the spread of the virus and emerging outbreaks.

- Timeframe: 1-3 Months (immediate)
- Audience: Academia, Vulnerable Populations, Nonprofits
- Type: Research, Data, Partnerships, Vulnerable Populations
- Recommendation: [Metrics](https://coronavirus.smartercrowdsourcing.org/recommendations/metrics)
- Part of: [Smarter Crowdsourcing in the Age of Coronavirus](https://coronavirus.smartercrowdsourcing.org/)

## Actions governments should take

1. Establish data security protocols for sharing specific levels of de-identified or identifiable data.
2. Create processes that allow individuals with the requisite credentials (e.g. researcher, clinician, public health official) to access data easily and consistently. These individuals should be able to download the data in near real-time for analytical and modeling purposes.

## Examples from around the world

1. Taiwan took advantage of its pre-existing [National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System](https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/hs.2016.0107) to integrate epidemiologic surveillance for COVID-19 starting in January 2020. The country built a robust contact tracing database with the information it collected from contactants, which allowed researchers to [analyze](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2765641) the data and find correlations to estimate under which conditions contactants are more likely to contract the disease, which then could better inform contact tracing efforts