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Ask HN: Where can I access live, raw data of Covid 19 cases by country?

2 points by aliakhtar ↗ HN
I'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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCa0JXEwDEk as reference).

Does anyone know where I can access the live, machine readable data of Covid 19 cases by country?

Do I need to build this out myself by parsing the html of WHO or such?

10 comments

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[dead] anigbrowl
Why? There's so many out there already, and it seems like you haven't familiarized yourself with that particular dataverse yet.
aliakhtar
Is there a calculator for showing the actual case numbers, inferred from the number of deaths?
[dead] anigbrowl
I don't know, and suggest you consult the resources another poster gave you and use the search box below. I repeat my question: why?
aliakhtar
Because, there's a difference between confirmed cases, and actual cases.

Based on the number of deaths, we can calculate the actual number of cases.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
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...

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...

Here's the NHS England_Improvement Covid-19 stats page, with excel files: https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas...

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

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

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.