"Google Flu Trends" ...gathering information on the number of times particular Wikipedia articles have been viewed. ??

....I'm terrible with rabbit holes....if only I could remember to keep AAA batteries in my pocket for my headlamp-

"A Syndromic COVID-19 Indicator Based on Insurance Claims of Outpatient Visits"


"Our COVIDcast map and API feature several novel early indicators of COVID-19 activity. In past posts, we discussed our large-scale daily surveys that, as of October 2020, have reached over 12 million people throughout the US, in partnership with Facebook and Google. In another ongoing data initiative, health system partners grant us access to various aggregate statistics from hospital records and insurance claims covering 10-15% of the United States population. From these data, we can extract informative indicators that can be early indicators of COVID activity. Early indicators are important because they help policymakers make more informed decisions and can also improve epidemiological forecasts."

"One indicator that we created from the outpatient insurance claims portion of this data is what we call the Doctor Visits or DV indicator, which estimates the percentage of outpatient visits (including telemedicine, urgent care, and emergency department visits) that are due to COVID-Like Illness or CLI. We will use % CLI-in-DV to abbreviate the percentage of outpatient visits due to CLI, the units of our DV indicator. Below, we explain how we calculate the DV indicator and discuss its relation to confirmed COVID-19 cases. We also discuss our observation that the DV indicator possesses significant spatial heterogeneity (it displays systematic county-to-county differences), and we describe a simple dynamic adjustment to address this issue."

..."Doctor Visit Indicator?


....based on outpatient insurance claims??

...."report cumulative confirmed cases based on the cases’ first date of public posting. As a result, the “number of new daily counts” (derived by successive subtraction from these reports) often refers to the number of cases published instead of those lab-confirmed on that date. In comparison, insurance claims indicate a “date of service”, which is typically closer to the testing date. Accurate dating of cases is critical for modeling, analysis, and forecasting."

[link to delphi.midas.cs.cmu.edu (secure)]

[link to delphi.cmu.edu (secure)]


"Accessing Open COVID-19 Data via the COVIDcast Epidata API"


"Massive surveys we conduct through Facebook: Facebook has been sending a random sample of its users to Delphi’s symptoms and behavior survey every day since April 6. Our survey averages over 70,000 respondents each day"


"Massive surveys we run through Google: From April 11 to May 14, 2020, Delphi conducted a single-question symptoms survey through Google. It reached over 100,000 respondents daily during its short run, and was a surprisingly informative measure of pandemic activity preceding medical contact. "

"nsurance claims: Medical insurance claims include diagnostic codes, lab orders, and charge codes which can be used to estimate COVID-19 activity in a region. We have several partners who provide us with aggregated statistics from claims, or allow us to derive such statistics from strictly de-identified claim records. We use this data to construct signals reflecting COVID activity in both outpatient and inpatient visits"

"Quidel COVID antigen tests: Quidel is a national provider of networked lab testing devices, and began making de-identified records of their COVID-19 antigen tests available to us in early May. This data source fills an important gap because many public testing data sources only include PCR tests, not antigen tests"

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