Data on numbers of tests, confirmed cases, and deaths for coronavirus (COVID-19) in the UK is published by the government, but it is fragmented and not always provided in consistent or machine-friendly formats. Also, in many cases only the latest numbers are available so it's not possible to look at changes over time.
This site collates the historical data and provides it in an easily consumable format (CSV), in both wide and tidy data forms.
Ideally the data publishers will start doing this so this site becomes redundant.
The following CSV files are available (note they are no longer updated):
- data/covid-19-cases-uk.csv: daily counts of confirmed cases for (upper tier) local authorities in England, health boards in Scotland and Wales, and local government district for Northern Ireland.
- Note that prior to 18 March 2020 Wales data was broken down by local authority, not heath board, and prior to 27 March 2020 there were no breakdowns by area for Northern Ireland.
- data/covid-19-totals-uk.csv: daily counts of tests, confirmed cases, deaths for the whole of the UK
- data/covid-19-totals-england.csv: daily counts of tests, confirmed cases, deaths for England
- data/covid-19-totals-northern-ireland.csv: daily counts of tests, confirmed cases, deaths for Northern Ireland
- data/covid-19-totals-scotland.csv: daily counts of tests, confirmed cases, deaths for Scotland
- data/covid-19-totals-wales.csv: daily counts of tests, confirmed cases, deaths for Wales
- data/covid-19-indicators-uk.csv: daily counts of tests, confirmed cases, deaths for the whole of the UK and individual countries in the UK (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland). This is a tidy-data version of covid-19-totals-*.csv combined into one file.
- data/daily/*.csv: daily counts, with a separate file for each date and country.
- No longer being published since 23 April 2020. Use data/covid-19-cases-uk.csv
Interpreting the numbers (more information on this DHSC/PHE page, and the PHE dashboard about page)
- "Tests" are the number of people tested, not the number of samples tested.
- "Confirmed cases" are the number of people with a positive test.
- "Deaths" are hospital deaths, so they don't include deaths of people with COVID-19 who died at home for example. (Although this changed in England on 29 April 2020.)
Note that the totals for the UK don't necessarily equal the sum of the totals of the four nations (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland), due to differences in date reported.
You can use these files without reading the rest of this document.
There is an experimental Datasette instance hosting the data. This is useful for running simple SQL on the data, or exporting in JSON format.
- 1 August 2020. Retired this repo. See discussion here.
- 2 July 2020. PHE started including Pillar 2 data in England confirmed case numbers. This data is now being included in this repository.
- 1 July 2020. England UTLA confirmed case data is no longer being included since it doesn't have Pillar 2 tests, which make up the vast majority of tests.
- 1 July 2020. NI data is no longer being included since the (undocumented) backend API changed again, and the NI Department of Health does not provide a machine-readable alternative. (See 2 June 2020 entry below.)
- 30 June 2020. With the new Leicester lockdown, media attention around the lack of Pillar 2 data in England has increased. I have added a prominent warning to the top of this README.
- 2 June 2020. I received a reply from the NI Department of Health to my enquiry about making machine readable downloads available. For this reason I may stop collating NI data in this repository, since the JSON API the code uses is undocumented and changes from time-to-time. See #63.
Mr White
Thank you for your query. Currently, the information on which the dashboard statistics are based is being drawn from live systems and the data is continually being revised. This means that we do not at this time feel it would be appropriate to provide data that is still volatile and is subject to both revision and change.
Regards
Information and Analysis Directorate
- 28 May 2020. DHSC is now providing a timeseries of testing data, linked to from this DHSC/PHE page.
- 23 May 2020. DHSC is no longer reporting the number of people tested (daily or cumulative) in Pillar 2, hence it is not possible to give an overall total.
- 12 May 2020. The PHW dashboard data download link is no longer static - it changes every day, and there is no easy way to retrieve it, since it is dynamically generated in Tableau.
- 1 May 2020. The NI Department of Health dashboard has been re-instated.
- 28 April 2020. The NI Department of Health is no longer reporting the number of people tested, just the number of tests.
- 21 April 2020. The PHA NI dashboard was suspended since it was reporting incorrect data. Test and total confirmed case numbers are being announced on Twitter by @healthdpt. Area breakdowns are no longer being provided.
- 21 April 2020. The PHW dashboard now has a link to download the data in XLSX format. The URL is dynamically generated however, so it's still not easy to automate the download.
- 20 April 2020. The PHE dashboard now has stable URLs for its CSV downloads.
- 18 April 2020. PHA NI launched a dashboard to replace the daily surveillance reports.
- 15 April 2020. A new dashboard for UK and England was launched, replacing the ArcGIS one. As a part of this change the XLSX/CSV files for daily indicators, and case counts by region and UTLA (in England) are no longer being produced. They have been replaced by CSV files, or - for programmatic access - a JSON feed.
- 14 April 2020. No per-area case numbers produced for NI, even though it is a weekday (Tuesday). Yesterday was a bank holiday, and no case numbers were produced either.
- 9 April 2020. The reporting period for case numbers in Wales changed. "For operational reasons, we are moving the point at which we count new cases of Novel Coronavirus (Covid-19) back from 7pm to 1pm. Case numbers on Thursday [9 April] will therefore be lower than usual, and will return to normal on Friday [10 April]."
- 8 April 2020. Scotland started publishing numbers for people in hospital and intensive care, by health board. They also started reporting numbers that were less 5 as "*".
- 6 April 2020. Wales published a new interactive dashboard, which gives data for confirmed cases, and testing episodes, broken down by local authority and health board. There is historical data too. Unfortunately there is currently no way of exporting the raw data from the dashboard.
- 2 April 2020. Scotland reported a more timely process for counting deaths.
- 29 March 2020. There's a new spreadsheet that includes historical data for the dashboard. This includes cases (by country, English UTLA, English NHS region), deaths (by country), and recovered patients (although this isn't being updated at the time of writing).
- 27 March 2020. UK daily indicators now include number of deaths for UK, England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
- 26 March 2020. Northern Ireland's Public Health Agency (PHA) started publishing confirmed cases by Local Government District (LGD) on weekdays.
- 25 March 2020. The reporting period for number of deaths changed. Previously it was for the