Is fine-grained/individual data being collected, too? Will it be ever shared?

[psyguy]

Hi,

The datasets released on this repo (like those of Johns Hopkins University, at country level) are coarse datasets (total counts of infected/dead/recovered). Such coarseness highly constraints statistical modeling beyond simple¹ descriptive analysis.

By individual/fine-grained data I mean status updates of individuals from testing positive until the case is closed (i.e., by recovery or death), and some background descriptions (age, sex, pre-existing conditions, etc.). A similar dataset have been collected by Xu and colleagues (Nature Scientific Data, DOI:10.1038/s41597-020-0448-0) and is online on @beoutbreakprepared's repository.

I can imagine @nytimes would have legal concerns (e.g., regarding HIPAA laws, as @CBG-63 has mentioned in #11). I'm no lawyer, but I hope some sort of anonymization might waive that.

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¹ Actually, in case you are interested in modeling with coarse data, take a look at coarseDataTools R package. It has facilities to estimate, e.g., case fatality rate (Reich et al. 2012; DOI:10.1111/j.1541-0420.2011.01709.x).

[davidsj]

This would be particularly helpful for estimating the long-term case fatality rate while we're still in the early stages of rapid exponential growth.

The large majority of confirmed cases in the US are recently contracted and haven't run their course yet. This data would allow accurate knowledge of the typical time lag from diagnosis to death in fatal cases, in order to properly adjust for this in estimating the case fatality rate.