Tracking COVID-19 Data

Some of my recent blog posts have been about COVID-19 data visualization. This post is about the data itself, and I wanted to highlight work being done by The COVID Tracking Project which provides several interesting features.



The first is a page where you can access the most recent data about positive and negative tests, pending test results, and deaths. In addition to a summary statistic for the United States, you can view the numbers that are broken down by state, along with any caveats about how they are collecting and reporting data for each state.

The second is a live spreadsheet on Google Sheets which lets you see the raw numbers. If you’re a geek like me, you might download the data, play with it in Excel, and perhaps try to make some interesting charts (hey, I couldn’t resist).

Lastly, there is support for a basic API that currently supports a GET request that returns either data or a .csv file. Since I’m not a developer, I haven’t taken advantage of the API, but you can simply go to the page and download the latest CSV files if you want.

This is an important topic because one of the main gaps in our current knowledge of COVID-19 is the number of people who are infected. Their methodology and FAQs provide information about where the data come from, and it appears that they are doing their best to provide reliable data and to provide transparency about its limitations. Kudos to their entire team of contributors.