As someone who learnt data science almost entirely by self-learning (and getting eviscerated by HN whenever my work hit the front page), public datasets were an immensely important tool for prototyping and refining my data analysis skills.

However...

The coronavirus is a case where it's very easy to unintentionally misinterpret the data, and casual analysis will likely add more noise/false information which is not what is needed now. (and any analysis will become out-of-date very quickly).