STAT January 18, 2022
When the pandemic hit, technology companies pledged to do their part by cracking open their secretive datasets and letting public health researchers mine it for clues about how to bring Covid-19 under control. Two years in, it’s clear that big data isn’t the panacea they’d hoped for.
“Early on, when everyone was freaking out, there was a perception that there would be almost like a magic moment where the data would materialize and it would answer our questions, and we would adapt and control the pandemic and things would be great,” said Andrew Schroeder, a co-leader of the Covid-19 Mobility Data Network, a group of academic researchers and nonprofit partners that pulled in smartphone location data shared by tech companies...