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hiyouga/covid-19-tracker

Analysis updated 2026-08-03 · repo last pushed 2020-03-22

1Audience · researcherComplexity · 2/5DormantSetup · hard

TLDR

A dataset of travel and activity histories for 4,626 COVID-19 patients in China, built using AI to extract structured details from raw text reports for researchers and analysts.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((repo))
    What it does
      Patient movement dataset
      AI text extraction
      4626 patient records
    Data fields
      Demographics and occupation
      Trajectory and timestamps
      Transport and events
    Use cases
      Trace transmission routes
      Map outbreak hotspots
      Public health research
    Audience
      Epidemiologists
      Data journalists
      Public health officials
    Notable
      No setup docs
      Real world crisis data

Code map

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What do people build with it?

USE CASE 1

Trace common locations and transportation routes among confirmed COVID-19 cases in a specific city.

USE CASE 2

Map patient movement patterns to identify transmission hotspots for data journalism.

USE CASE 3

Search and analyze structured patient trajectory data to understand how the virus was spreading across China.

What is it built with?

PythonNLP

How does it compare?

hiyouga/covid-19-tracker0xallam/posthog0xallam/search-engine
Stars111
LanguagePythonC++
Last pushed2020-03-222026-03-262023-08-23
MaintenanceDormantMaintainedDormant
Setup difficultyhardmoderatehard
Complexity2/53/53/5
Audienceresearcherpm founderdeveloper

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get it running?

Difficulty · hard Time to first run · 1h+

The project has no setup instructions or documentation on data format and distribution, so users must figure out how to access and use the data on their own.

No license information is provided, so the default copyright terms apply and usage rights are unclear.

In plain English

The repository behind the Beihang University big data research team's COVID-19 tracker is a project that organizes information about confirmed COVID-19 patients in China. The team collected publicly available travel and activity histories for 4,626 diagnosed patients and turned that unstructured text into a clean, organized dataset. The goal is to help researchers, public health officials, and the public understand how the virus was spreading by making patient movement data easy to search and analyze. The project works by taking raw descriptions of where patients went and what they did, then using natural language processing, a type of artificial intelligence that can read and extract meaning from text, to pull out key details. For each patient, it captures basic information like gender, age, home location, occupation, and whether they had contact with Wuhan or Hubei province. It also records their movements, including timestamps, locations, modes of transportation, and events they attended, along with any known relationships between patients. Public health researchers, epidemiologists, and data analysts would be the primary users of this kind of dataset. For example, an epidemiologist studying how COVID-19 spread through a specific city could use the structured trajectory data to trace which locations or transportation routes were common among confirmed cases. A data journalist could also use it to map out transmission patterns or identify hotspots. By having all of this information in a structured format rather than scattered across news reports and government notices, it becomes far easier to spot trends and draw meaningful conclusions. The project page itself does not include any documentation beyond the description of the dataset. There are no setup instructions or usage guidelines provided, so it is unclear how the data is formatted or distributed. What is notable is that it represents a serious effort to apply AI-powered text extraction to a real-world public health crisis, transforming messy, scattered patient reports into something that could support meaningful analysis.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Using the patient trajectory dataset structure with fields like gender, age, home location, movements, and transportation, write a Python script to load the data and find the top 10 most frequently visited locations across all patients.
Prompt 2
Given this dataset of 4,626 COVID-19 patient trajectories, help me create a heatmap visualization showing patient movement patterns by city over time using pandas and matplotlib.
Prompt 3
Write an analysis query to identify patients who had contact with Wuhan or Hubei province and trace their subsequent movements to find potential transmission chains in the dataset.
Prompt 4
Help me parse and structure the patient relationship data from this dataset into a network graph so I can visualize how confirmed cases are connected to each other.

Frequently asked questions

What is covid-19-tracker?

A dataset of travel and activity histories for 4,626 COVID-19 patients in China, built using AI to extract structured details from raw text reports for researchers and analysts.

Is covid-19-tracker actively maintained?

Dormant — no commits in 2+ years (last push 2020-03-22).

What license does covid-19-tracker use?

No license information is provided, so the default copyright terms apply and usage rights are unclear.

How hard is covid-19-tracker to set up?

Setup difficulty is rated hard, with roughly 1h+ to a first successful run.

Who is covid-19-tracker for?

Mainly researcher.

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