WHO COVID-19 Dashboard: Global Case and Death Counts from December 2019 to October 2020

Daily aggregated counts of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths reported to the World Health Organization. The data covers the period from 31 December 2019 to 18 October 2020, with a reported total of 39,596,858 confirmed cases and 1,107,374 deaths as of the last update. The WHO Emergency Health Panel compiled the data from official communications, ministry of health websites, and social media accounts.

Use Cases

• Modeling global pandemic growth curves based on daily case and death counts.
• Analyzing the temporal progression of the COVID-19 outbreak in its first year.
• Validating epidemiological models using official WHO-reported figures.

Strengths

• Provides a global snapshot of 39,596,858 confirmed cases and 1,107,374 deaths as of a specific date.
• Covers a critical early period of the pandemic from December 2019 to October 2020.
• Data sourced from official WHO channels, including ministries of health.

Limitations

• Row count and column-level documentation are unknown; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Last update date is known (18 October 2020), but update frequency is unspecified; data is historical.
• Data may reflect reporting biases inherent to the official sources and compilation methods described.

Provenance

Source

World Health Organization (WHO) Emergency Health Panel.

Collection Method

Aggregated from official communications under the International Health Regulations (2005), supplemented by monitoring official health ministry websites and social media accounts.

Time Range

31 December 2019 to 18 October 2020.

Freshness

Last data update was 18 October 2020, 14:43 CEST.

Geography

Global.