Welcome to Data Against COVID. This site is about understanding one of the strangest, most disorientating periods in recent memory through the prism of data, artificial intelligence and human behavior. As the pandemic unfolded, the world was awash with numbers.
Cases. Deaths. Tests. Vaccinations. Mobility. Hospitalizations.
There were graphs for everything, each one trying to explain a little more about what was going on. But the numbers never tell the whole story. Behind every dataset was uncertainty, latency, bias, fear, learning and, often, simple human chaos. That’s what this site is for.
Data Against COVID is about how data was used to understand the pandemic, how AI was deployed to track, forecast and communicate through the pandemic and how both began to seep into daily life in ways that few had foreseen. Sometimes that will mean writing about forecasting models and dirty data.
Sometimes it will mean writing about loneliness, digital intimacy, conversational AI and the less visible social changes that took place while everyone was fixated on dashboards. This isn’t a site for researchers and technical specialists. It’s for anyone curious about what happened at the intersection of data, AI and COVID.
My aim with Data Against COVID is to take complex ideas and make them accessible, useful and, hopefully, entertaining.
I think it’s also worth being clear about something else. Technology is never just about technology. The pandemic proved that much, at least. Data informed policy. AI shaped messaging. Digital tools became integral to the way people sought out information, help and, sometimes, connection. This site is about the interplay of the raw and the emotional. On Data Against COVID, you can expect to find posts about:
- COVID data analysis, and where it succeeded or failed
- How dirty data affects AI model training
- The use of AI in public health and crisis response
- Loneliness, digital intimacy and conversational tech
- How COVID affected our relationship with machines
- Why human nuance matters even when the data is perfect
Fundamentally, Data Against COVID is an attempt to look back a little more closely. Not just at what happened, but what it revealed, about systems, models, tools and people. Because if the pandemic began as a public health crisis, it soon became something far bigger: a data story, an AI story and a resolutely human one.