races through the world's second most populous country, harried Indians have turned to volunteer-driven data portals for information to keep themselves safe in this third wave.
Mourning its closure on the portal's blog, one frequent user said checking the site had"become a habit like sitting down with a glass of mellow single malt after sundown", adding that its information had guided his major decisions through the pandemic. "These days there are a lot of efforts towards building models for predicting how the future months will look like with the new variant, or maybe you want to know what the reproductivity rate is for a certain district… Those kinds of research efforts require data, especially of the kind we are putting out," said Dr Asha Subramanian, the founder and CEO of Semantic Web India, one of the several stakeholders behind incovid19.org.
He added he would like to see more efforts placed on integrating the various databases under the government's control, so that they can become a source of actionable information in the current stage of the pandemic. India, for instance, has yet to create a systemic mechanism to disseminate data oncritical issues such as vaccine efficacy and breakthrough infection rates.
Ms Rukmini S, a data journalist, said it is important to acknowledge how the government can restrict the scope of journalism without these independent efforts. Not having district-level data readily available, for instance, can offer a cursory, even misleading, view of the pandemic with reporting focused only on state-level data or restricted to major cities.
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