WHO data for China will not be added to CSSE COVID-19 repository

[CSSEGISandData]

Announcement #6543 documented that the World Health Organization is receiving updated COVID-19 case totals from the People’s Republic of China National Health Commission (NHC) that are not being provided publicly. Thank you all for your patience as we evaluated the integration of this data.

After extensive discussion, our team has concluded that we will not be integrating case or death totals reported by WHO into our data repository for the following reasons:

• The WHO data for China is a single national value that is inclusive of case and death totals for Hong Kong SAR, Macau SAR, and Taiwan. The data in our repository is at the subnational resolution.

• Any use of the WHO-China data would require extensive back correction to avoid a +100M daily spike. There is no ‘defensible’ date from which to begin the back correction.

• Consistent with the US State department designations, we treat Hong Kong SAR, Macau SAR, and Taiwan as regions of special sovereignty. As such, these locations are separate entries in our data repository.

• There is no means to continue to update Hong Kong SAR, Macau SAR, and Taiwan using their independent reporting and include WHO data for China that would not result in individual cases or deaths being duplicated.

We will continue with the following operational posture for reporting on China COVID-19 cases and deaths data:

• Update deaths based on totals provided in the China CDC novel coronavirus infection briefs (https://www.chinacdc.cn/jkzt/crb/zl/szkb_11803/)

• Maintain case values for China locations, except for Hong Kong SAR and Macau SAR that have independent reporting using the China CDC source. Note, this data may not update if the China CDC source does not update.

• Continue updating cases and deaths data for Taiwan using the source https://sites.google.com/cdc.gov.tw/2019ncov/taiwan?authuser=0

Cases and deaths data reported by WHO can be found here: https://covid19.who.int/region/wpro/country/cn. We recommend accessing data for WHO after or around December 9, 2022 when the difference between our time series begins expanding.

Thank you again for your patience.