
Ask HN: Where can I access live, raw data of Covid 19 cases by country? - aliakhtar
I&#x27;m working on a calculator to calculate the actual number of Covid 19 cases based on the number of deaths in a region (using https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=mCa0JXEwDEk as reference).<p>Does anyone know where I can access the live, machine readable data of Covid 19 cases by country?<p>Do I need to build this out myself by parsing the html of WHO or such?
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actionowl
This might help:
[https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19](https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19)

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DanBC
There's a few problems you'll need to overcome.

1) We don't know what the fatality rate is yet. If you have a super-accurate
count of deaths to covid-19 you can't work out the true infection rate because
estimates of lethality range from about 0.% to 3%.

2) You can't get a super accurate count of deaths, and certainly not a real
time count. Looking at the UK we have "deaths of people who tested positive
for Covid-19 who died in hospital". We're not testing people, even if they're
in hospital. There's a presumption that if you have certain symptoms then you
have covid-19. So there's a bunch of people being treated for covid-19, who
die from covid-19, but who were not tested as having covid-19. Their deaths
won't be in these daily figures. And then we have deaths outside hospital:
covid-19 is currently ripping through care homes. Maybe 50%[1] of covid deaths
are happening in care homes, but if they're not counted in the daily stats
you're missing all of them. The UK does have a more accurate figure from the
Office For National Statistics, but there's quite a lot of lag in those
figures. Someone dies, a doctor certifies the death, that's registered, and
then sent to ONS for coding.

3) Everywhere is counting deaths and cases differently. I've talked about the
UK and that's just 4 (or 1) countries.

Here's the UK daily covid dashboard:
[https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/f94c3c9...](https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/f94c3c90da5b4e9f9a0b19484dd4bb14)

Here's the Office For National Statistics page talking about the different
ways of counting death: [https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2020/03/31/counting-deaths-
involving...](https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2020/03/31/counting-deaths-involving-
the-coronavirus-covid-19/)

Here's the NHS England_Improvement Covid-19 stats page, with excel files:
[https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-
areas...](https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-
areas/covid-19-daily-deaths/)

For worldwide there's the John Hopkins dashboard:
[https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html](https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22854047](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22854047)

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aliakhtar
You're 100% correct. It won't be fool proof, by any means. But, it'll be
better than the current situation, which is to have only the confirmed cases
and no estimate of actual cases.

I'm thinking of making the best guess on the fatality rate, time to double,
etc, and allowing people to tweak the variables. And using the officially
reported death numbers.

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ColinWright
I use this:

[https://opendata.ecdc.europa.eu/covid19/casedistribution/csv](https://opendata.ecdc.europa.eu/covid19/casedistribution/csv)

