COVID-19 Data Center

Open access to high-quality popular data sources of general interest through our Rich Data Services API and web applications to support research and decision making.

Featured Data
The nationally representative public-use data for the Coronavirus Attitudes and Behaviors Survey 2020, a collaborative effort between Westat and the Stanford University School of Medicine, is now available in our COVID-19 Data Center.
About the Study Explore the Data
Featured Data
Watch our new video to see how easy it can be to gain access to the U.S. Small Business Administration Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) data using the Rich Data Services (RDS) API or web based applications.
Watch Explore the Data
Featured Catalog
Our Johns Hopkins Country Level COVID-19 catalog feeds data daily from JHU repository and includes records measuring the counts of confirmed, active, recovered, and deaths for a country on a specific date.
Explore the Data Postman Docs

Overview

Rapid access to high quality COVID-19 and related contextual data is critical for policymakers, researchers, the media, and the public at large, to understand and effectively respond to emerging evidence. Such data is, however, not particularly easy to find and access, and is rarely in pristine or ready-for-use state. More importantly, it is rarely published in machine friendly formats or "as a service", locking it away from the information systems, data scientists, developers, or machine learning environments. These issues result in significant data wrangling, unreliable modeling, and misinterpretation while dramatically slowing down our capacity to react.

Given the critical needs for timely access to high quality COVID-19 data, we strongly believe our Rich Data Services platform, combined with our strong expertise in data and metadata management, can make a significant difference in addressing this global crisis, both in the short and long term.

Through the delivery of free high quality COVID data as a service, this project aims at:

Offering data scientists, developers, and other users a flexible platform for the discovery, extraction, and online or offline analysis of data
Granting immediate data access to computer applications or web sites, enabling rapid retrieval, analysis, visualization, machine learning, or other purposes.
Addressing quality issues by delivering curated data in open formats, ready for immediate use, allowing the focus to be on the research, and reducing wrangling and other time-consuming tasks
Facilitating harmonization and data linking through the use of standard classifications and common variable naming conventions
Promoting the use of open data, domain standards, and related best practices
Making curated data and tools developed for this project available in a public repository

Getting Started

Explore the Data

Use the RDS Explorer to browse the data, consult the codebook, create custom extracts by filtering records and selecting variables, or produce personalized open data packages for download.

The tool can also be used by developers and data scientists to generate API calls or source code for instantly reading the data into analytical tools, creating visualizations, and for other purposes.

Browse

Aggregate the Data

Use the RDS Tabulation Engine to aggregate data across various dimensions to rapidly create analytical tables. Start from scratch, or select from the following examples:

The tool can also be used by developers and data scientists to generate API calls or source code for instantly reading the data into analytical tools, creating visualizations, and for other purposes.

Tabulate

For Developers

Resources and examples to get you underway. Visit the RDS web site developer section for additional information.

Data Sources

We are in the initial stages of this project and are initially focusing on popular or quality pilot datasets. We are currently providing access to the following:

Case counts based on the Johns Hopkins daily report organized by Country, U.S. States, and U.S. County
U.S State level case and tests data from the COVID Tracking Project
Datasets collected directly from selected U.S. State agencies (New York, Ohio, Tennessee)
Case data from the Government of Canada and Statistics Canada
Canada Public Use Microdata files for the just-released Impacts on COVID-19 Survey the Labour Force Survey (Jan 2018 - Apr 2020), and other relevant datasets

See our public COVID-19 GitHub project for more information on these resources, along with source data and tools we are using to curate and publish in our catalog. We have identified several other potential sources, and anticipate for our collection to rapidly grow over time. We naturally welcome your suggestions.

Note that the nature of the data drives how the RDS API and applications should be used. Make sure you understand the data before jumping into the applications or analysis. Traditional survey data is naturally easy to browse or tabulate, but may require the use of statistical weights. Time series data, commonly used by many of the COVID-19 datasets, must always include a time dimension in their analysis. Be a responsible user!

Users & Researchers

COVID-19 data can be accessed through the following web applications, built for your convenience on top of the RDS API, and offering a browser-based user interface:

The RDS Explorer, which allows you to browse record level data, create subsets, and download in various open formats for offline analysis.
The RDS Tabulation Engine: for quickly creating analytical tables or data extracts for visualizations.

Developers & Data Scientist

If you are an application/web developer, scientist interested in data as a service, or into machine learning, RDS has you covered. No longer shall you need to spend hours data wrangling or coping with proprietary systems.

RDS is a REST based Application Program Interface (API) that can be used to concurrently query data and metadata from your favorite package or environment, to support web portals, visualizations, applications, analysis, or download.

Data Publishers

RDS is, amongst other things, a modern data publication solution. For this particular project, we act as the data broker by collecting, curating, and publishing the data ourselves. Contact us if you do have data that you feel would be a good addition to our COVID-19 project data collection.

Our RDS platform is also available to early adopters, visit our Rich Data Services website for more information.

If you need assistance getting started or have any questions, consult our knowledge base or simply open a free helpdesk request for assistance.

What's Next

RDS Explorer, RDS TabEngine, or above examples, are just a few of the many potential uses of the RDS API. Building your own applications or visualizations, accessing the data and metadata from your favorite analytical tools, integrating with your web portal, or enabling machine learning is where the power of the platform lies. So unleash your creativity, skills, and passion and use RDS in your own way.

Our project objectives are to help deepen the understanding of COVID-19, support better research, and foster evidence-based decision making. We also hope to encourage the adoption of best practices for the publication of data. Should you need assistance, you can:

We're looking forward to hearing your stories and seeing your work.

How To Help

This initiative is primarily supported through internal resources, which can be challenging for a small company. We welcome any kind of support you may be able to provide to help us focus on free public data services. This includes financial support, in-kind contributions, and domain expertise. At this time, we are particularly looking for:

Direct sponsorship or donations
Funding opportunities, and assistance preparing or submitting proposals
Amazon Web Services credits to operate the infrastructure (or engineering support)
Suggestions or feedback on how we can improve the data offering, data quality, or our platform in general
Spreading the word about the data center and RDS

About Rich Data Services

The web applications and services (API) are powered by our Rich Data Services (RDS) platform, empowering both information systems and users by concurrently delivering data and metadata as a service in formats engineered for immediate use. As a developer or data scientist, you can directly query the data through the RDS API and open source libraries to build your own solution or for analytical purposes. Casual users and traditional researchers can leverage our browser-based application to explore, tabulate, or download data for offline analysis.

Learn More

About MTNA

Metadata Technology North America (MTNA) delivers modern solutions for the management of data. Our innovative technologies and unique data and metadata expertise enable the rapid delivery of customs solutions to address common data collection, management, and dissemination challenges. Contact us should you have any questions, suggestions, or need assistance with your data.

Licensing & Citation

The majority of the data undelrying this project is harvested and curated from various sources and is subject to its original licensing where applicable. Documentation, metadata, and derived data produced by Metadata Technology North America Inc., its partners, and other contributors are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY). All software, tools, and related scripts/programs available through this Website are, unless otherwise noted, available under an Apache License Version 2.0.

Disclaimer

This Website, underlying services, and content herein, including all data, metadata, scripts, documentation, and resources, are provided to the public strictly for educational and academic research purposes. The content relies upon publicly available data from multiple sources that do not always agree. Metadata Technology North America Inc. hereby disclaims any and all representations and warranties with respect to the Website, including accuracy, fitness for use, and merchantability. You are responsible for determining the suitability of this data for your purposes. Reliance on the Website for medical, financial, or other kind of decision, or the use of the Website for commercial purposes, are strictly prohibited. If you do not agree with these terms, and to our general Website term and privacy policy, you may not access and use this Website.

Frequently Asked Questions

How are datasets selected for this project?

This is at this point mainly based on our team finding data of interest, and our ability to ingest them rapidly in the catalog. Our current focus on the United States and Canada, and we are also looking into Europe and other highly affected countries. Africa is also high in our priority. There are many data sources out there, and we welcome suggestions.

How is RDS COVID data & metadata curated?

We typically perform the following tasks when assessing and converting data for publication in the RDS COVID-19 Catalog:

Restructure the data as needed to facilitate analysis with RDS or statistical and analytical packages
Convert names into standard codes. For example, we typically change country, subdivisions, and other geospatial entities into ISO, ANSI, FIPS, codes.
Convert dates to standard ISO formats, and extend the dataset by adding additional time variables (particularly for time series)
Capture core metadata (data dictionary), such as variable names, labels, descriptions, classifications
Load the data into a data warehouse

Once a workflow is well-defined, we then automate the process to ensure data refreshes with the source.

What standards is this project using?

On the metadata aspects, our management practices and platform are informed by internationally accepted standards for the management of official statistics and scientific data, specifically the Generic Statistical Information Model (GSIM) and the Data Documentation Initiative. These have been endorsed by the High Level Group for the Modernization of Official Statistics, the Research Data Alliance, and numerous data archives, research groups, and organizations around the world. We as much as possible aim to abide by the FAIR principles.

ISO 3166 for countries, their subdivisions
ISO 8601 for dates and other temporal variables
For United States, FIPS 5-2 and FIPS 6-4 (while technically obsolete, this remains widely used) as well as other coding schemes used by the U.S. census Bureau.
Statistics Canada classifications
Other international and national classifications maintained or endorsed by the United Nations Classification Division.

Once a workflow is well-defined, we then automate the process to ensure data refreshes with the source.