Open Public Data and Early Factor Analysis in a Developing Public Health Event

An important role of timely public availability of data in the early analysis and formulation of hypotheses in developing public health events, such as infectious epidemics has been highlighted in many results. The recent pandemic demonstrated perhaps the first example where serious attempts were made to present consistent and detailed information, on the international scale and in near real-time, for a developing major public health event, with important and numerous implications for the formulation of responses and policies. In this work we analyze characteristics of publicly available data, including timeliness; granularity i.e., level of detail; consistency between different reporting jurisdictions and others; as well as issues and problems with processing publicly available information for early analysis and formulation of early hypotheses. Based on the experience and the analysis in this work we attempt to formulate expectations and conditions for the collection and publication of publicly available data for future public health and more generally, events with potentially high societal impact.