• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 14, 2020

Microsoft Bing has launched a website, COVID-19 Tracker, that provides details on confirmed, active, recovered, and fatal cases from Coronavirus worldwide.

Globally, about 74,349 people have recovered from the virus and 5,815 people have died.

There are 155,681 total confirmed cases worldwide as of March 14, 2020 with 75,517 active cases at the time of writing this article. 

China tops the list with 80,824 total cases, followed by Italy with 21,157; Iran with 12,729; South Korea with 8,086; Spain with 6,313; Germany with 4,525; France with 4,500; the United States with 2,499; Switzerland with 1,375 and the United Kingdom with 1,140, among others. Several countries confirm one case.

An interactive map allows site visitors to click on the country to see the specific number of cases and related articles from a variety of publishers such as Los Angeles Times, Travel + Leisure, and NPR. The articles are specific to that country or region.

Microsoft, along with many other academic publishers, has opened its paywalls to give site visitors access to COVID-19 papers, accelerating the dissemination of the scientific discoveries and the citations to these articles.

Microsoft Academic is a search engine that does not include user private data such as browsing and clicking activities in the search ranking. To identify search behavior, it compare the rankings in its equivalent Google Scholar to understand the effectiveness of using search behaviors. A list of research papers can be found here.

On Friday, President Trump during a press conference spoke about a website being developed by Verily Life Sciences, an Alphabet subsidiary and sister company of Google. The project is believed to be Project Baseline, an initiative that is intended to make it easy for people to contribute data and participate in clinical research.

Verily calls it the “next generation of healthcare tools and services.”

Participating Project Baseline members include Stanford Medicine, Duke University School of Medicine, and the American Heart Association.