In early April, at the height of the COVID-19 crisis, a call went out to a select community around the world to come together to make sense of a senseless pandemic.

Forced lockdowns, the collapse of world economies, isolation, fears of infection and mostly the hundreds of thousands of lives tragically lost have been described as “extraordinary” and “unprecedented” in the news media.

We are learning how to manage this frightening global pandemic as we go. But one thing is certain: There is a lot we do not know.

The quest for answers to how COVID-19 is affecting different cultures is why the newly formed International Society for Quantitative Ethnography (QE) launched the “QE COVID Data Challenge,” a seven-day data sprint involving nearly 100 data and research experts collaborating remotely from 16 countries, including Denmark, Hungary, Australia, South Africa and Sri Lanka.