About Delphi Epidata (including COVIDcast)
Delphi Epidata is a database platform, repository, and API for epidemiological signals (also called “indicators”). It was launched in 2016 and significantly revamped during the pandemic. Delphi Epidata was purpose-designed for hosting signals for epidemic and pandemic detection, tracking and forecasting. It has built-in support for data versioning, calendar reporting effects, anomaly and trend detection, backfill projection, privacy-based censoring, and geographic, temporal and demographic breakdown and aggregation. The Delphi Epidata repository contains over 500 different current or historical signals, tracking flu, COVID-19, dengue, norovirus and other pathogens, and covering all rungs of the severity pyramid.
We procure data streams that reflect epidemic and pandemic activity from a wide variety of sources – including unique industry partnerships and scraping of publicly available data – and extract from them in real-time disease-related signals at the finest possible geographic, demographic and temporal granularity.
The COVID-19 related portion of Delphi Epidata is also known as COVIDcast, and constitute what we believe may be the largest public repository of real-time, geographically-detailed indicators of COVID-19 activity in the U.S.
We make all our signals freely available in real-time to the greatest extent allowable, using a public API which is updated with new data daily. We also provide:
- a signal discovery tool, to explore what epi-signals are available in Delphi Epidata and elsewhere in the community
- a general signal visualization tool
- a signal dashboard and a “classic” map-based version to visualize a core set of COVID-19 and flu indicators
- a COVID-19 signal export app, a dashboard builder, and more
- R and Python packages to extract signals from the Epidata repository, and R packages to further process them and to create epidemic forecasting models (learn more about the packages)
Some of the underlying data from which our signals are extracted would not exist or be publicly available without Delphi’s efforts. These include a massive national daily survey called the COVID-19 Trends and Impact Survey (CTIS) that we have deployed in partnership with Facebook, which has been taken by over 25 million Americans during 2020-2022; and aggregated counts extracted from an enormous database of de-identified medical insurance claims, covering more than 35% of the U.S. population, made possible through health system partners including Change Healthcare.
Severity Pyramid
