Published August 10, 2021
Data, Statistics and the Pandemic
Here at Nastel, we have a very active and passionate debate culture, and most work mornings the coffee room is a hive of opinions and ideas. It often feels like I imagine the debates on the Roman Senate floor, or a Greek philosopher’s dinner would have felt. Frankly, it’s energizing and sets us all up for the day ahead!
Before the pandemic took hold a lot of discussions centered around the virus, and of course, as we have an analytics platform and are full of ideas, the conversation led to the creation of a data lake of COVID-19 information. This data lake ingests core data from several reputable sources and then adds some analytics to provide answers to several questions the office water cooler crowd was asking.
At Nastel we are able to turn questions into answers, so quickly on really any topic for which machine data is available is stunning.
We’ve all been using this data for more than a year, and I still check the dashboard daily. We added analytics that shows what keywords are trending on social media, and we track several key indicators such as R0 and CFR, terms which none of us really knew prior to COVID-19.
Since this tool is built on the Nastel Platform, using the Nastel XRay Analytics engine, the data is live, so you can drill into the details, driving into countries, states, and counties, so most of us track our local data through this system.
And we got several requests from people to be able to build their own additions to the analytics, so we opened it up so anyone can log in to the backend of our Nastel SaaS platform and add their own custom views of the data or add their own in additional data sources.
We were not experts in COVID-19, but we are experts at data analytics, and making it easy for people with IT skills to analyze their own data, quickly and in ways that are self-explanatory.
Have a look for yourself.
