Our World in Data switches to Johns Hopkins University as our main data source for COVID-19 cases and deaths

Since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic we have provided daily updates of confirmed cases and deaths for all countries. For most of this period, we relied on daily figures published by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) as our underlying data source. The global dataset has been an incredibly valuable contribution from the ECDC over the course of this year.

However, the European CDC announced in November 2020 that it would switch from a daily to weekly reporting schedule from December onwards. In order to continue providing daily updates for you, Our World in Data has decided to transition away from ECDC as our source.

As of November 30th, all data on confirmed cases and deaths will be sourced from the daily dataset provided by Johns Hopkins University.

This includes all confirmed cases and deaths data presented in individual charts on Our World in Data; the data included in our COVID-19 Data Explorer; and in our GitHub repository.

We realize that many users rely on the data that we aggregate for their own work. We have therefore tried to minimize any knock-on impacts of this change as much as possible. The format (variable names and types) of our complete COVID-19 dataset remains the same — this should prevent any impacts for users sourcing this data from us directly. However, note that the source data is different; please make sure you update your source credits accordingly.

The data last sourced from the ECDC remains available as an archive on GitHub.

We will continue to provide daily updates for the months ahead. The other aspects of our data — including testing, policy responses, hospitalizations, and excess mortality — will continue as normal.

→ You can explore all this data in our COVID-19 Data Explorer.

Hannah Ritchie (2020) - “Our World in Data switches to Johns Hopkins University as our main data source for COVID-19 cases and deaths” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/covid-data-switch-jhu' [Online Resource]

@article{owid-covid-data-switch-jhu,
    author = {Hannah Ritchie},
    title = {Our World in Data switches to Johns Hopkins University as our main data source for COVID-19 cases and deaths},
    journal = {Our World in Data},
    year = {2020},
    note = {https://ourworldindata.org/covid-data-switch-jhu}
}

Reuse this work freely

All visualizations, data, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

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 original source of the data in our documentation, so you should always check the license of any such third-party data before use and redistribution.

All of our charts can be embedded in any site.