Amazon Web Services Inc. is throwing more resources at the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, hosting and curating a massive public dataset relating to the coronavirus.

The company announced today that it’s making available an AWS COVID-19 dataset, which it says is a centralized repository of data and other information regarding the spread of the novel coronavirus that’s wreaking havoc across the world.

“As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to threaten and take lives around the world, we must work together across organizations and scientific disciplines to fight this disease,” the AWS Data Lake team wrote in a blog post. “At AWS, we believe that one way we can help is to provide these experts with the data and tools needed to better understand, track, plan for, and eventually contain and neutralize the virus that causes COVID-19.”

The data lake has been seeded with curated data from a number of organizations, including case tracking data from John Hopkins University and the New York Times, and information on hospital bed availability from Definitive Healthcare. The dataset also contains more than 45,000 research articles on the coronavirus and related diseases from the Allen Institute for AI. Over time, AWS said, it expects to add much more data from other reliable sources when it becomes available.

AWS says it’s hopeful that the data will be useful for healthcare workers and planners on the front line in the fight against COVID-19. For example, it could be used to build a dashboard that tracks infections in specific geographic regions. In turn, that information can help authorities to deploy resources such as hospital beds and ventilators more efficiently.

“The AWS COVID-19 data lake allows experimenters to quickly run analyses on the data in place without wasting time extracting and wrangling data from all the available data sources,” the Data Lake team said. “They can use AWS or third-party tools to perform trend analysis, do keyword search, perform question/answer analysis, build and run machine learning models, or run custom analyses to meet their specific needs.”

One organization that’s already mining Amazon’s COVID-19 dataset for “epidemiological insights” is the nonprofit group Chan Zuckerberg Biohub.

“Our team of researchers is now analyzing trends in disease spread, its geography, and time evolution by leveraging datasets from the AWS COVID-19 data lake, combined with our own data, in order to better predict COVID epidemiology,” said Jim Karkanias, vice president of data science and information technology at the Biohub.

The data lake is just one way that Amazon has lent its expertise to the fight against the coronavirus. Last month the company announced a $20 million program to support organizations that are working on new, better ways of diagnosing the coronavirus. Amazon will support accredited research institutions and private firms that are working on same-day diagnostics solutions to speed up testing for the disease.

Amazon isn’t the only big tech firm that’s helping to make information on the pandemic more widely available. On Wednesday, Google LLC said it’s creating a special version of its Contact Center AI software that helps businesses deploy virtual customer support agents. The Rapid Response Virtual Agent program is specifically designed to answer questions about the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s being made freely available to government agencies, healthcare organizations and other sectors severely impacted by the global crisis, including travel, financial services and retail.

Google has also created its own open data platform for sharing information on the coronavirus, called the COVID-19 National Response Portal. The platform, created using data from HCA Healthcare and built and operated by SADA Inc., gives a way for other healthcare providers to safely share and display anonymous, aggregated metrics from hospital systems into a single platform, to show a complete and real-time view of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Photo: MiroslavaChrienova/Pixabay