Support for public health workers fighting COVID-19
This week, we're beginning a series of Doodles to recognize the many people responding to COVID-19—from doctors and nurses caring for people on the front lines, to teachers and food service workers ensuring essential goods and services are still available. Coinciding with the start of National Public Health Week in the U.S., our first Doodle in the series shines a light on the public health workers who are at the forefront of fighting this disease.
Public health is what we do together as a society to create the conditions in which everyone can be healthy. Public health workers include leaders at organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), as well as scientists, like epidemiologists, field researchers, and lab scientists and technicians working to better understand the virus, find new cases, and track and predict and prevent its spread.
Community education and access to reliable information are critical parts of promoting and protecting public health. Over the last few months we’ve partnered with WHO, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and national health ministries to surface authoritative information on COVID-19. On Search, people can find official information on how to prevent COVID-19 transmission, with links to helpful resources from health authorities. On YouTube, we have a dedicated news shelf with COVID-19 news from authoritative sources, curated playlists with official information, and we’ve connected popular YouTube creators with public health leaders. We’ve also launched #StayHome #WithMe, a campaign that encourages people to practice social distancing with playlists on education, cooking, fitness and more.
Beyond this education effort, we’re proud to support the important work public health workers are doing behind the scenes to learn more about the virus, develop and deploy vaccines, and create evidence-based policy intended to reduce community transmission.
Scientists are critical to understanding and combating COVID-19. We’re supporting their work by providing Google Cloud research credits, including high performance computing to researchers. On Google Cloud’s Kaggle data science community, a coalition of leading research groups have gathered more than 44,000 COVID-19-related scholarly articles to share with data scientists.
To aid researchers, data scientists, and analysts, we’ve also made available a hosted repository of public datasets, like Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering, the Global Health Data from the World Bank, and OpenStreetMap data, free to access and query through our COVID-19 Public Dataset Program.
Just last week we published an early release of our COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports: aggregated, anonymized data on movement trends across places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, to give public health workers insights to make more data driven policy. These reports are designed to inform public health officials as they implement and refine social distancing measures designed to prevent the spread of the virus, while protecting essential movement.
Today we salute public health workers who are playing an important role in responding to this pandemic. Over the next two weeks, our Doodles will honor other essential frontline workers, including healthcare workers, first responders and the many people keeping services like sanitation, food service, public transit, schools, and more up and running. Thank you to all the people who are working to save lives and keep communities safe during this pandemic.
