Open data on effectiveness of lockdowns
Open data insights provide an important guideline for the reopening of European countries and researchers continue to measure the success of different policies.
As the lockdowns are slowly lifted across Europe, policymakers and researchers focus their attention on the effectiveness of the different government measures during the lockdowns to improve effectiveness of policies. Often the effectiveness cannot be measured directly, but indicators (gained with open data) can shine light on the impact of different policies.
Open data fills a knowledge gap as it can provide an indication of the effectiveness of different lockdown measures by comparing different data variables across countries in Europe. For example, the researchers at the University of Oxford have uploaded a recent Working Paper on Variation in Government Responses in May 2020. They use open data to measure ‘containment and closure’ (e.g. school closing, workplace closing, etc.), ‘economic response’ (e.g. income support, debt, etc.), ‘health systems’ (e.g. testing policy, contact tracing, etc.) and ‘miscellaneous’ (other responses).
The European Data Portal dedicated the first COVID-19 Data Story to the Oxford Government Response Tracker. Since then, the response tracker has evolved over time with data updates and improvements in indicators to measure government policy. Our editorial team will continue to write content on valuable outcomes of this research in the coming weeks and months ahead.
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