COVID-19 statistics appear everywhere in the media. It is not always clear where to find the data and if they can be downloaded for further analysis. Various organizations collect data about COVID-19. Governments are responsible for collecting routine data about cases of infection and deaths. Most countries maintain national health information systems. These systems collect and manage data from all public health facilities and produce regular reports. We provide links to some of the major websites which publish secondary or raw data or publish papers based on the data.
Government websites
Most national governments regularly publish numbers of infections and deaths from COVID-19 and some international organizations maintain global dashboards showing the numbers of cases and deaths worldwide. Some of these data are in tabular form but most governments have at least published the actual daily numbers of cases and deaths from COVID that they have provided to WHO (and are available on the WHO COVID-19 dashboard).
- This website links to ministry of health sites worldwide, most publishing COVID-19 data – some with downloadable data.
- This website links to national statistical offices which publish some COVID-19 related data, mainly economic.
- The United Nations Statistical Division has developed a data hub called UNStats COVID-19 response which features some national dashboards. This site also provides resources to support and encourage national statistical offices and other data producers to leverage and use open data.
International dashboards
Several institutions gather information from global sources and present real-time COVID-19 trackers or dashboards
- The World Health Organization maintains a global COVID-19 dashboard and daily situation reports.
- Johns Hopkins University maintains a dashboard and with data downloadable at GitHub.
- The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington publishes this dashboard.
- HealthMap COVID-19 is published in collaboration with the Open COVID-19 Data Curation Group with data downloadable on GitHub.
- The New York Times maintains the Coronavirus Map: Tracking the Global Outbreak
- The UNStats COVID-19 response features some other global dashboards
Signposting sites
The sites below provide updated signposts to other sites
- The US National Institutes of Health maintains an inventory of Open-Access Data and Computational Resources to Address COVID-19.
- The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control provides links to COVID-19 data
- The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides links to selected secondary data and statistics sources to help researchers find data on COVID-19: COVID-19 Secondary Data and Statistics
Open data websites
Several sites provide open access to COVID-19 related data.
- data.world has partnered with Johns Hopkins University, Tableau, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, New York Times, the Associated Press, and Harvard University among others to create the COVID Data Resource Hub. The site mirrors data on partner sites and provides the user the SQL editor and a wide variety of tools (e.g. R, Python, Tableau, Power BI).
- Open Data Watch: DATA in the time of COVID-19:To address the ongoing need for data-driven decision making, open data Watch has put together some of the most helpful articles they’ve found, organized by the stages of the data value chain: availability, openness, dissemination, and use and uptake. They update these articles as new information becomes available.
- Our World in Data has a COVID-19 page which provides graphs, slideshows and data which are free for everyone to use for any purpose. Their entire dataset is downloadable on GitHub
- Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD): Use of Open Government Data in response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak: OECD is compiling data, information, analysis and recommendations regarding the health, economic, financial and societal challenges posed by the impact of COVID-19 on this site.
- Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX): UNStats has created a dedicated page on the HDX platform so that its community can find COVID-19 related data from many sources and covering multiple countries.
- The World Bank: Understanding the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic through data provides a dashboard and downloadable datasets that include socio-economic data.
- GitHub houses the Johns Hopkins University data alongside thousands of other data repositories. As of July 21st 2020, a search for “COVID” on the GitHub site resulted in 80,292 repository results.
Published research
- The World Health Organization is gathering the latest international multilingual scientific findings and knowledge on COVID-19 in the WHO COVID-19 database.
- PubMed has created LitCovid as a curated literature hub for tracking up-to-date scientific information about COVID-19.
- The Stephen B. Thacker CDC Library is collecting COVID-19 research articles and compiling them into an easily accessible and downloadable database
- Journal publishers such as Elsevier, BMJ and Springer Nature are making relevant research papers and book chapters freely accessible online.
- The UCSF IGHS COVID-19 Research Watch puts together a weekly summary of original COVID-19 research focused on public health, including epidemiology, non-pharmaceutical interventions, and presentation patterns.
Contents
Additional resources
Statement on Data Sharing in Public Health Emergencies
data.world published this on demand webinar: How you can use data to fight COVID-19 using open access data from multiple sources.
The open data page of this site describes the process of opening data to the public