A year on, citizen science is powering Covid-19 research

Misinformation, technology and, more so than ever before, pure medical research — processing the wall of information that came with

Covid-19

has not been easy. But for nearly a year now, experts and enthusiasts have been working together to help people make sense of the information overload.

It’s an extension of

citizen science

, in which amateur scientists help professionals with their inputs on real scientific research.

When it came to Covid-19, in the first few months, there was very little clarity on the numbers — every district, every state had its own system of recording cases and deaths. And it was not all in one place. The confusion spurred a series of volunteer-run Covid-19 dashboards and mythbusting pages and sites. By now, they have evolved into much more, identifying gaps in information and quickly calling for public participation to fill those.

“We realised the need to understand how the disease is building up at very local scales, and spatially. This analysis has been missing from government reports,” said Pinaki Chaudhuri from Chennai, a volunteer with the

Indian Scientists

’ Response to Covid (ISRC). Besides scientists, doctors, engineers and tech experts, ISRC is run by journalists and students. The collective has some 700 members by now.

It takes the basic data collated by another volunteer-driven initiative, the dashboard covid19india.org, or from government reports and then prepares mathematical models to make projections — what happens if there’s a large migration wave, or a staggered lockdown is announced. For instance, if there were just 10 asymptomatic patients in Delhi on Sunday, the number would jump to over a million by February 20 next year.

What this kind of analysis leads to are patterns governments may have missed. For instance, ISRC found that among the 7,748 patients who had died in Tamil Nadu between May and September, 92% had passed away within just 4 days of testing positive.

And these analyses are then used by scientists from all over. “Researchers from Cambridge University, the Centers for Disease Control in the US, the University of Georgia, and scientists in Australia have used our data,” said Jijo Ulahannan from Kasaragod, who has been volunteering with bilingual dashboard covid19kerala.info.

Meanwhile, also magnified by the fear around coronavirus has been misinformation. For that, too,

crowdsourcing

has come in handy. If scientists can find out what fake news is circulating, they can quickly counter it with real information. Sandhya Koushiki, neurobiologist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, who volunteers with ISRC. “There is still room to make things clearer. So, we have these call-in programmes where the public can ask questions about Covid-19.” And they do it in 19 languages.

So, no, drinking tea can’t “cure” Covid-19, air purifiers won’t protect you either and Indians are not immune to the virus.