Blow to researchers as Covid portal set to fall silent

A portal that provided granular data and helped researchers build mathematical models to predict Covid-19 surges in the country is set to fall silent, triggering panic among the scientific community which is scrambling to arrange an alternative.

The closure of Covid-19India.org was announced by the over 300-strong collective of data volunteers from across India, who said they will cease updating the website from October 31.

“With our work and personal lives limping back to normalcy, we believe it is time for us to look ahead and focus on them,” the collective said in a statement issued on the portal.

The volunteers were instrumental in collating data from all states and making it available to the public since the start of the outbreak in March 2020.

The closure will have grave ramifications for researchers and data firms involved in Covid-19 projections, as they use an Application Programming Interface (API) to automatically collect data from the portal for use in their mathematical models.

For Professor Sashikumar Ganesan, the website's demise will be a big blow.

Ganesan, Chair of Centre for Computational Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science, co-developed the partial differential equation (PDE)-based model, which was at the forefront of Covid case predictions in the country.

His model, which helped predict the peak of the first wave and the duration of the pandemic in Karnataka, may now be crippled.

“We have raised concerns about this matter with the National Task Force on Covid-19 in August. We have asked that some means be used to keep the portal alive or create an alternative. We have not heard anything back,” Ganesan said.

He explained that data from Covid-19India.org is critical to running simulations. “While Karnataka gives good district-level data in the daily bulletins, the information must be in digital form to be captured by our API. We don’t have the resources to manually tabulate the data everyday,” he said.

“If the government comes forward, it will be nice, but I am not optimistic,” he added.

Duplication of site

The concern over data unavailability was shared by Professor Manindra Agrawal, Head of the Department of Computer Science at IIT Kanpur, who helped develop the famed Sutra model. Part of a three-member team of experts tasked with projections, he had accurately predicted the peak period of India’s second wave in India.

He said urgent steps are on to duplicate the site at IIT Hyderabad. “When the portal is inactivated, we will certainly have a challenge collecting the data. While overall Covid-19 numbers are not challenging to get, the lack of Covid-19India.org will be keenly felt in the collection of district-level data,” he said.

The backup plan is to hire a team to collate the data and update the site regularly, Agrawal said.

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