We collect, cross-check, and publish COVID-19 data from 56 US states and territories in three main areas: testing, hospitalization, and patient outcomes, racial and ethnic demographic information via The COVID Racial Data Tracker, and long-term-care facilities via the Long-Term-Care tracker. We compile these numbers to provide the most complete picture we can assemble of the US COVID-19 testing effort and the outbreak’s effects on the people and communities it strikes.
If you’d like to use the data, whether it’s for a specialized project or just to better understand COVID-19 in the US, here are a few things you should know right away.
- We update the full dataset each day between about 5:30pm and 7pm Eastern time, with limited additional updates as new information arrives.
- All our data comes from state and territory public health authorities or official statements from state officials. Not all states report all data, which means we can’t, either. You can read more about our data sources here.
- We do not automatically scrape data or attempt to offer a live feed. Our data is gathered and double-checked by humans, and we emphasize accuracy and context over speed, so our count will often be behind automated trackers.
- Many data sources, like the JHU Tracker and New York Times Coronavirus in the US tracker, focus on case counts (positive tests) and deaths. We started this project to get more complete testing data in an attempt to learn how many tests the US is conducting and how many tests individual states and territories are conducting.
- For more specific questions about the data, please see our FAQ and our data definitions.
Our data, charts, and analyses are licensed CC-BY, which means that anyone may use the content as long as they give credit to The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic.