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Canadian COVID-19 Data Archive

The Canadian COVID-19 Data Archive is a collection of datasets, documents and webpages related to the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada, with files spanning March 2020 to January 2024. This project supported automated, daily snapshots of Canadian COVID-19 data from governmental and non-governmental sources beginning August 25, 2020 and concluding January 31, 2024. The Archive is maintained by Jean-Paul R. Soucy on behalf of the COVID-19 Open Data Working Group. It is a sister project to the Timeline of COVID-19 in Canada, a definitive dataset for COVID-19 in Canada.

For a list of available datasets, see the Data catalogue below. For information on how to access the datasets in the archive, see Accessing the data.

File name timestamps are given in ET (America/Toronto) in the following format: %Y-%m-%d_%H-%M. Files were archived nightly beginning around 22:00 ET.

All code in this repository is covered by the MIT License. Archived datasets may be used under the licenses/terms of use assigned to them by the data creators.

Table of contents:

Data catalogue

A searchable catalogue of datasets, sorted by province/territory (and city/organization, if applicable), is available in the Data Explorer. Full details for each dataset, including any notes pertaining to them, are available in the Search list of datasets section of the Data Explorer. Feature requests and bug reports for the Data Explorer should be made in its dedicated GitHub repository.

A note about data from Quebec: when both French and English data files are available, the French dataset should usually be considered definitive (and in most cases, these files have been captured in the archive for a longer duration).

Accessing the data

The easiest way to explore the data in the archive and download individual files is the aforementioned Data Explorer.

The files in the archive are hosted under the following domain under the domain https://data.opencovid.ca/archive. For example, the PHAC Epidemiology Update from November 4, 2020 may be downloaded at the following URL:

https://data.opencovid.ca/archive/can/epidemiology-update-2/covid19-download_2020-11-04_23-38.csv

Additionally, a complete copy of the index is available as a SQLite database at the following URL:

https://data.opencovid.ca/archive/index.db

This database can easily be queried using a programming language and used to download a list of files.

Previously, a JSON API was available to search the file index, which supported filtering by UUID and date ranges, as well as removing duplicate files. This API was retired in February 2024.

Recommended citation

COVID-19 Canada Open Data Working Group. Canadian COVID-19 Data Archive. https://github.com/ccodwg/Covid19CanadaArchive. (Access date).

Notes about the data archive

On several occasions, the nightly archival script has failed to run. Depending on when the failure was identified, this may have resulted in a partial or total loss of archival data for that day. A list of these days is provided below:

In addition, the method of archiving websites (HTML files) was modified on 2021-12-30. This may have caused a handful of HTML files not to be marked duplicates of the previous day's file when they otherwise would have been. On 2022-03-26, the old method of archiving websites was erroneously used, once again resulting in some HTML files not being marked duplicates when they otherwise would have been.

Notes about the archival tool

Updates to the Canadian COVID-19 Data Archive are managed by the archivist package. Development of archivist originally took place in this repository but has since been migrated to its own repository.

Acknowledgements

Shannon Fiedler created the banner image for the Canadian COVID-19 Data Archive.

Many people are to thank for contributing archived data and code to this repository:

Jens von Bergmann / Simon Coulombe / James E. Wright / Farbod Abolhassani / Shelby L. Sturrock / Safa Ahmad / Jacques Marcoux / Shraddha Pai / Matti Aleve / Scott van Millingen / Robson Fletcher / Les Perreaux / Allen Kwan (Twitter/LinkedIn) / Christine Hagyard (Twitter/LinkedIn) / Amy Bihari (Twitter/LinkedIn) / Razieh Faraji (Twitter/LinkedIn) / David Lussier / Matthias Schoettle / Jeremy Moreau