COVID-19¶
This page is a compact summary of our COVID-19 work, with all the relevant links to download our COVID-19 datasets.
I just want the data!
Our work¶
Our World in Data (OWID) has collected COVID-19 data from various domains since the pandemic started. We believe that to make progress against the Coronavirus disease – COVID-19 outbreak, we need to understand how the pandemic is developing. For this, we need reliable and timely data. Therefore, we have focused on bringing together the research and statistics on the COVID-19 outbreak.
Legacy data work¶
We started working on COVID-19 data in early 2020, developing and implementing several data pipelines to process and publish the data. All this work has been live and shared with the public via our GitHub repository https://github.com/owid/covid-19-data and our old COVID documentation. We have complemented our data work with extensive research articles, which we have shared on our topic page.
Publications¶
Hasell, J., Mathieu, E., Beltekian, D. et al. A cross-country database of COVID-19 testing. Sci Data 7, 345 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-020-00688-8
Mathieu, E., Ritchie, H., Ortiz-Ospina, E. et al. A global database of COVID-19 vaccinations. Nat Hum Behav 5, 947–953 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01122-8
Herre, B., Rodés-Guirao, L., Mathieu, E. et al. Best practices for government agencies to publish data: lessons from COVID-19. The Lancet Public Health, Viewpoint, Volume 9, ISSUE 6, e407-e410 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(24)00073-2
Transition to ETL¶
We started working on COVID-19 before our ETL system. In mid-2024, we decided to migrate all our COVID-19 data work into ETL and make our data available from our catalog.
Download data¶
Our compact COVID-19 dataset is a compilation of the most relevant COVID-19 indicators we have collected in the last few years. It consolidates indicators from various datasets into a single file. It comes with metadata, which explains all the indicators in detail. In the past, this dataset was generated and shared in our GitHub repository.
Download our compact dataset (CSV) Download metadata
In addition to our compact dataset, we provide individual datasets with all our COVID-19 indicators. These files are direct exports from our ETL.
| Data | Metadata | |
|---|---|---|
| Cases and Deaths | download | download |
| Excess Mortality | download | download |
| Excess Mortality (The Economist) | download | download |
| Hospitalizations | download | download |
| Vaccinations | download | download |
| Vaccinations (by age) | download | download |
| Vaccinations (by manufacturer) | download | download |
| Vaccinations (US) | download | download |
| Testing | download | download |
| Reproduction rate | download | download |
| Google mobility | download | download |
| Government response policy | download | download |
| Attitudes (YouGov) | download | download |
| Donations (COVAX) | download | download |
All our COVID-19 data pipelines are specified in our DAG.
Data providers¶
The data produced by third parties and made available by Our World in Data is subject to the license terms from the original third-party authors. We will always indicate the data source in our database, and you should always check the license of any such third-party data before use.
Learn more about the licensing in the metadata files.
Understanding our metadata¶
Our metadata contains all the relevant information about an indicator. This includes licenses, descriptions, units, etc. We use this metadata to bake our charts on our site.
Learn more in our metadata reference.
Acces the data with our catalog¶
Our catalog library is in alpha.
Install our catalog package¶
pip install owid-catalog
Usage and preview¶
URIs identify our data, and for COVID data these go like this:
data://garden/covid/latest/{DATASET_NAME}/{TABLE_NAME}
Where:
DATASET_NAMEis the name of the dataset (e.g.case_death)TABLE_NAMEis the name of the table (e.g.case_death)
Notes:
- A dataset can be a collection of tables (equivalent to DataFrames). For instance, several files (or DataFrames) might be in our 'Vaccination' dataset (e.g., global data, US data, etc.).
- Our excess mortality dataset is currently under the namespace
excess_mortality, i.e. with URIsdata://garden/excess_mortality/latest/{DATASET_NAME}/{TABLE_NAME}.
Check all our COVID data¶
Run:
from owid import catalog
# Preview list of available datasets (each row = dataset)
catalogs.find(namespace="covid")
# You can load any dataset (using the row of the above-returned table)
tb = catalogs.find(namespace="covid").iloc[3].load()
Load data¶
Use a URI from the table below1.
| Data category | URI |
|---|---|
| Cases and deaths | garden/covid/latest/cases_deaths/cases_deaths |
| Excess Mortality | garden/excess_mortality/latest/excess_mortality/excess_mortality |
| Excess Mortality (The Economist) | garden/excess_mortality/latest/excess_mortality_economist/excess_mortality_economist |
| Hospitalisations | garden/covid/latest/hospital/hospital/ |
| Google Mobility | garden/covid/latest/google_mobility/google_mobility |
| Policy Response (OxCGRT) | garden/covid/latest/oxcgrt_policy/oxcgrt_policy |
| Indicator decoupling | garden/covid/latest/decoupling/decoupling |
| YouGov | garden/covid/latest/yougov/yougov |
| YouGov (Composite) | garden/covid/latest/yougov/yougov_composite |
| Vaccinations (US) | garden/covid/latest/vaccinations_us/vaccinations_us |
| Testing | garden/covid/latest/testing/testing |
| Sequencing / Variants | garden/covid/latest/sequence/sequence |
| Decoupling | garden/covid/latest/decoupling/decoupling |
| Sweden confirmed deaths | garden/covid/latest/sweden_covid/sweden_covid/ |
| UK COVID Data | garden/covid/latest/uk_covid/uk_covid/ |
and run the following code:
from owid import catalog
rc = catalog.RemoteCatalog()
uri = "..."
df = rc[uri]
Access metadata¶
Objects df are not pure pandas DataFrames, but rather owid.catalog.Table datasets, which behave like DataFrames but also contain metadata. You can access metadata like this:
# Table metadata
df.metadata
# Column (or indicator) metadata
df[column_name].metadata
→ Learn more about our metadata
-
more items are being added to this table shortly. ↩