Google, in an effort to help combat COVID-19, created a COVID-19 Public Datasets program to make data more accessible to researchers, data scientists and analysts. The program will host a repository of public datasets that relate to the COVID-19 crisis and make them free to access and analyse, according to the press release by the Google Cloud Platform. Some of the COVID-19 datasets hosted include the ones form the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CSSE) dataset, Global Health Data from the World Bank, and OpenStreetMap data.

According to Google Cloud Platform, there will be free hosting and queries for all COVID datasets. This means Google pays for storage of datasets in the program. BigQuery, a web service that enables analysis of big data working, provides free queries over certain COVID-related datasets to support the response to COVID-19. “Queries on COVID datasets will not count against the BigQuery sandbox free tier, where you can query up to 1TB free each month,” states the release. These will remain free till September 15, 2020. 

The contents of these datasets are provided to the public strictly for educational and research purposes only. In order to further help researchers all datasets in the COVID-19 public dataset program have a “COVID-19” label, as well as free Google Cloud credits are also provided. 

All the datasets under this program can be found at this link.