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Here Are the Ways Science and Tech Experts Can Volunteer to Help With the Coronavirus Response
Calling all scientists and engineers
If you’re a scientist, engineer, or health professional, part of your training is to serve society. You might be wondering in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic how you can help when you’re working at home. Here are actions you can take as an individual in your community and online, as well as organized efforts by scientific and technical organizations that you can take today in the United States.
There may be similar efforts internationally, and I encourage those who are aware of such initiatives to add these to the response section (along with any efforts in the United States that I might have missed). I’ll then edit the main article to add them in. As of now, I found that scientific and technical volunteer efforts fall into five categories: digital, challenges, human resources, manufacturing, and education.
Digital
The Covid Tracking Project
This project tracks the positive and negative results, pending tests, and total people tested for the virus as reported by states and local governments. The CDC is not reporting all this data, nor are all states necessarily providing it. So the project needs people to listen to press conferences, watch the news, contact sources, and find emerging databases to try to find this information. It’s also looking for individuals who have the specialized ability to request records from their state governments. Volunteer needs are changing constantly, so go here to see what expertise is needed and here to fill out a Google form to volunteer. You can follow this Twitter feed for regular updates.
U.S. Digital Response for Covid-19
This group, led by former government and corporate technical leaders, is signing up health care, data, engineering and product development, general management, operations, supply chain/procurement, and other technical volunteer experts to help government officials at the national, state, and local level. State and local governments need help collecting and collating data from private and public testing facilities, developing self-assessment digital…
