Our World in Data will rely on data from the WHO to track confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths

[lucasrodes]

Johns Hopkins University will stop publishing data on confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths. Our team will replace our entire time series with WHO’s weekly-updated data on 8 March. This change will not affect users of our charts and dataset.

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Johns Hopkins University has been at the forefront of collecting and reporting data on confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths since the outbreak began in 2020. However, it recently announced that it would stop updating its data on 10 March 2023.

Our team at Our World in Data recognizes the importance of up-to-date data on the pandemic. We will switch our primary source to the World Health Organization (WHO), which updates its dataset weekly.

To keep this data consistent over time, we will replace the entire time series with WHO data on 8 March 2023.

Our goal is to continue providing the most complete and timely data on the pandemic, and relying on the WHO data is the best way to achieve this.

This change will be seamless for our users. The URL of all our charts and the variable names in our dataset will remain the same.

All other COVID-19 datasets we maintain will remain unchanged.

We want to take this opportunity to thank the team at Johns Hopkins for their crucial work since the beginning of the pandemic. Their efforts have been invaluable in helping us understand the impact of this virus across the world.

[beansrowning]

Are Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau being handled separately or dropped entirely from the Cases/Deaths metrics?

[lucasrodes]

Hi @beansrowning,
Thanks for your message.

We now rely on the WHO COVID-19 Dashboard (see https://covid19.who.int/). You can read more about this in our post: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-jhu-who.

Important notes:

• The data is shared once a week by the WHO.
• The WHO records the cases and deaths in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau under China.
• You can access our latest export (8 March 2023) with data from Johns Hopkins University at https://covid.ourworldindata.org/data/owid-covid-data-old.csv.

I hope that this helps,
Best regards,

[beansrowning]

Thanks. We require disaggregated data for these three so will have to start pulling those data from primary sources.

[MikhailKuklin]

Hello. Do I understand correctly that the next update of https://covid.ourworldindata.org/data/owid-covid-data.csv will be on the 15th of March e.g. one week from the 8th of March?

[lucasrodes]

Hi @MikhailKuklin,
This file is updated on a daily basis. However, the metrics concerning confirmed cases and deaths are only updated whenever the WHO updates their dataset. The WHO has announced that they are updating their dataset once a week, on Wednesdays.

In summary, new confirmed cases and deaths values should be available every Thursday at https://covid.ourworldindata.org/data/owid-covid-data.csv

[MikhailKuklin]

Hi @MikhailKuklin, This file is updated on a daily basis. However, the metrics concerning confirmed cases and deaths are only updated whenever the WHO updates their dataset. The WHO has announced that they are updating their dataset once a week, on Wednesdays.

In summary, new confirmed cases and deaths values should be available every Thursday at https://covid.ourworldindata.org/data/owid-covid-data.csv

Thank you @lucasrodes. If I understand correctly, columns with the metrics concerning confirmed cases and deaths pass nan before Thu?

[lucasrodes]

@MikhailKuklin Yes! If of interest, we have this dataset with only confirmed cases/deaths: https://github.com/owid/covid-19-data/blob/master/public/data/cases_deaths/full_data.csv. Not all metrics are present there and some names might differ from the primary dataset (https://covid.ourworldindata.org/data/owid-covid-data.csv).