Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, cross-disciplinary data sets for the virus have been proliferating daily. However, these can be difficult for researchers to find, link to and reuse — for example, if they want to explore new hypotheses or to test existing ones. To this end, we have developed the COVID-19 Data Index (www.covid19dataindex.org).

Originally funded by the US National Institutes of Health as part of the Big Data to Knowledge project, the index hosts a metadata catalogue of COVID-19 data sets.

These range from, for example, clinical, sociodemographic, environmental, economic and mobility data to case statistics and genomic sequences. These data are collected from large repositories, research papers and individual online sources, among others. Users can filter search results by type (‘-omics’ data versus clinical data, for instance), repository or geographic location. The index then supplies links to the original data and the download page.

We update the COVID-19 Data Index daily. Finding data on COVID-19 is no longer an obstacle that could delay discoveries.