[Central News Agency] The British "Daily Telegraph" revealed that after the "Our World in Data (OWID)" (Our World in Data, OWID) global database switched to COVID-19 data from the World Health Organization (WHO), Taiwan's data was merged into China.

Chase Nelson, a biologist living in Taiwan and a researcher at the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States, pointed out that combining data from Taiwan and China is not conducive to analysis, and studying how each country has historically responded helps to provide more information. Prepare for the future.

In addition, the data consolidation obscures Taiwan's early successful experience in responding to the epidemic, and it also prevents the outside world from gaining insight into Taiwan's unique strategy.

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In fact, public information shows that OWID announced as early as February 28 that due to the decision of Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins University) to stop publishing data on confirmed and dead cases of COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019), OWID Since March 8, the weekly update data of WHO has been fully used as the main source of information.

The statement pointed out that since the outbreak of the COVID-19 global pandemic in 2020, Johns Hopkins University has played an important role in the collection and release of related data.

However, the Coronavirus Resource Center (Coronavirus Resource Center) of Johns Hopkins University will stop related work starting from March 10, due to the continuous decline of public epidemic data in various states in the United States and the improvement of the federal government's data processing capacity.

OWID stated that in order to provide as complete and timely information on the epidemic as possible, WHO data is currently the best available option.

OWID has been widely cited during the COVID-19 global pandemic.

However, the actual measurement results of the reporter on the COVID-19 database of the OWID website showed that the list of countries on the home page of the database no longer had the option "Taiwan"; And historical data, although there is still an option of "Taiwan" (Taiwan), but after clicking in, the web page displays "no matching data".

Edouard Mathieu, director of data research at OWID, told The Daily Telegraph that it was not up to OWID to decide which countries to include.

He said OWID does not collect data or make adjustments on its own, but merely copies WHO data and makes it easily accessible.

OWID's database "no longer shows any data about Taiwan" due to a change in data sources.

A WHO spokesperson said Taiwan's data disappeared from OWID because "our China data covers the entirety of greater China, including Taiwan, and does not list them separately".

Ni Chengzhi tweeted that the WHO's response was unsatisfactory.

China and Taiwan submitted data separately, and the final release by WHO is actually a summation of the data that were originally presented independently.

In addition, although the WHO is responsible for merging Taiwan and China, Ni Chengzhi pointed out that as an important source of international information, OWID should ideally be included in the daily updated COVID-19 data from the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

(Editor: Xu Ruicheng) 1120318