Metabiota: Global Disease Outbreak Tracker

(15 March 2021) At the very beginning of 2020, the novel coronavirus infection hit the world. Metabiota’s early warning system, however, had already detected the first signs of COVID-19 in late 2019. By early January, Metabiota’s team of digital surveillance experts and epidemiologists were collecting, cleaning, and structuring data on suspected, probable, and confirmed cases and deaths from dozens of different sources into a composite, best-in-class dataset. In a few months, the COVID-19 pandemic had spread around the globe, and after one year, the disease had claimed the lives of more than 2 million people. 

Metabiota's data allows for comparison of COVID-19 directly with other epidemic events — current and historical.

• Data on disease outbreaks collected by Metabiota shows that case fatality rates from Ebola and yellow fever outbreaks in 2020 exceed the death rate from COVID-19 by 8 to 20 times. Thirty-seven percent of Ebola cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and over 40% of yellow fever cases in Nigeria were fatal, compared just to 2–5% of COVID-19 cases globally.

Metabiota has been providing this high-accuracy, up-to-date data throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as on nearly every other epidemic event in recent years, including Ebola and yellow fever (represented below).  At any given time, the Metabiota team is structuring data on approximately ten unfolding events. This near-real-time data is continuously added to Metabiota’s historical database of infectious disease events—the most comprehensive data repository of its kind in existence.

Note: The true case fatality ratio may be lower due to underreporting of cases. Case fatality ratios may vary substantially during an event, especially during the first few months of the event.