The Ministry of Health (MoH) has made official data on the COVID-19 pandemic publicly available via GitHub. This was made known by Director-General of Health, Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah earlier this evening via Twitter, who also hoped that the open-sourcing will expand the ministry’s analysis capability at the same time be able to leverage intelligence from all corners of society.
Through MoH’s official GitHub page, one will be able to find anonymous granular data on hospital admissions, critical care (ICU) and MOH’s cluster-based analysis of transmission. All information uploaded on the page are sorted in folders for ease of reference and are updated on a regular basis, so that visitors will be able to check the latest official data including the current number of cases in the country or by state, rate of COVID-19 critical care admissions, and so on, via the repository.
In addition, the ministry had decided to include public data on mobility and contact tracing from MySejahtera on GitHub as well. Dr Noor Hisham said that the mobility data even provides insight on the time density of check-ins, which he noted is something that most other mobility datasets do not contain.
MoH’s decision to release COVID-19 data via GitHub came just a few weeks after the Special Committee On COVID-19 Vaccine Supply (JKJAV) had also launched its own GitHub repository back in June. JKJAV’s GitHub contained detailed daily vaccination data from the National COVID-19 Immunisation Programme (PICK) which is available for viewing or download by the public as well.
MOH has introduced open-sourcing our data on the pandemic at GitHub platform: https://t.co/zwJOQ6vB5B
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We hope that we can broaden our analysis & leverage on intelligence from all corners of society, & sites like @OurWorldInData pull from our repo & feature our data.
— Noor Hisham Abdullah (@DGHisham) July 23, 2021
Truth to be told, this is a long time coming as the open-sourcing of COVID-19 data from MoH and JKJAV has been much requested by the public, especially by those involved in fields related to journalism and research. In his tweet, Noor Hisham also hoped that the data would be used and featured on research websites such as Our World In Data.
(Source: MoH / GitHub via Dr Noor Hisham / Twitter.)
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