APIs can’t help cure the disease but they can be used by developers to collect data about the outbreak, track its spread, and even produce data visualizations. In this article, a few APIs that let developers leverage the available data about the virus are highlighted.
CORD-19 – The CORD-19 Search and Navigate API is a Vespa.ai powered search of the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19), running in the Vespa Cloud.
CoronaTab – CoronaTab is an open-source platform for COVID19 data. The REST API is used to grab all of the data used on the CoronaTab dashboard.
Postman COVID-19 Testing Locations – COVID-19 Testing Locations is a crowdsourced, regularly-updated listing of coronavirus testing locations. The API returns the phone numbers and addresses of health institutions where COVID-19 testing is available.
COVID-19 Mauritius – This COVID-19 API returns information associated with the novel coronavirus in the Republic of Mauritius. The API returns total cases, total deaths, recovered, and their daily counterparts. Data is sourced from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CSSE), and BeSafeMoris, the official news source provided by the Mauritian Government.
Ethiopia COVID-19 Response – The Ethiopia COVID-19 Response API enables developers to write and retrieve coronavirus data in the country of Ethiopia. Community reports are available in JSON format.
COVID-19 India – This API returns COVID-19 stats in India sourced from The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, and covid19india.org. Developers can programmatically retrieve case counts, testing stats, hospital data, and advisories.
COVID-19 Data – The COVID-19 Data API provides information related to the 2019 novel coronavirus pandemic. Data is sourced from the JHU CSSE.
COVID-19 Mobility Tracker – The COVID-19 Mobility Tracker API allows developers to retrieve aggregated activity for each country and see how it changes in response to policies aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19. This data was originally published as PDFs and wasn’t available in a machine-readable format.
2019-nCoV API – The 2019-nCoV API enables developers to access updated information about the coronavirus disease. Data is sourced from Worldometer using a web scraper. The API is used as the source for a dashboard at https://the2019ncov.com/
CDC Content Services – The CDC Content Services API allows developers to retrieve CDC media content for display. This includes any media communications about COVID-19 that the CDC has through its various media channels.
Coronavirus.dev – Coronavirus.dev provides the latest number of cases, deaths, active cases, critical cases, and recovered patients. Developers can request data per country or for all countries. Data is sourced from dozens of national government pages.
Coronavirus Flutter Course – The Coronavirus Flutter Course API provides updated confirmed cases related to COVID-19. This is an interface used by Code With Andrea to teach how to build coronavirus tracking applications on the Teachable platform.
CovidQLTrack this API – This GraphQL API returns current cases and recovered patients in the specified country. Data is sourced from Worldometers.info.
COVID-19/2019-nCoV Realtime Infection Data – This is a free COVID-19/2019-nCoV Realtime Infection Data API. The data source is Ding Xiang Yuan (http://www.dxy.cn/). This API returns the latest coronavirus data by Chinese province, or by province, municipalities or countries outside China. Data includes location, number of confirmed patients, suspected infections, cured patients and deaths, and the time of press release, news summary and more.
Zip API – This API returns data in regards to population, age and hospital information based on zip code. Hospital data returned includes hospital name, address, phone, geolocation, naics description, website, helipad access, population, number of beds. While not strictly an API for COVID-19 data, the hospital information may be useful to those tracking the outbreak.
COVID-19 Japan – The COVID-19 Japan Web API retrieves coronavirus information of each prefecture in Japan. Data is updated every 2 hours.
COVID-19 Spain – The COVID-19 Spain API retrieves the number of COVID-19 confirmed cases, hospitalized cases, ICU cases, deaths, and the number of people who recovered from the COVID-19 disease. Data is sourced from the official Spanish government daily reports.
About Corona Covid-19 – The About Corona Covid-19 API provides statistics via REST API from The World Health Organization Situation Reports, JHU CSSE, The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, The National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China, The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, and China CDC Weekly.
This API retrieves data by country including population, number of cases confirmed, recovered, critical cases, deaths, recovered per death ratio, cases per million population, and more. The data is updated multiple times a day.
Bing COVID-19 Data – The Bing COVID-19 Data API provides total confirmed cases, deaths, and recoveries by country. Data is sourced from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, World Health Organization, and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. The API is used as a source for a live map tracker from Microsoft Bing.
The Bing COVID-19 Data API is the source for a live map tracker from Microsoft Bing. Source: Microsoft
COVID19INDIA API – The COVID19INDIA API is a coronavirus tracker for cases in India. The API returns daily confirmed cases, daily deceased cases, and daily recovered cases as time-series data. This information is also available cumulatively and per district.
COVID-19-REPORT – The COVID-19-REPORT API tracks COVID-19 cases worldwide. Developers can retrieve brief reports, brief time series, latest cases in the world or in a specific region or country, and time series in the world or in a specific region or country.
Coronavirus Data – The Coronavirus Data API enables COVID-19 information sourced from JHU CSSE. The API is able to return cases by country. Summaries are updated daily. A streaming API is also available that uses Webhooks to notify when new daily data is retrieved.
api-covid-19-india – This API retrieves daily statistics, hospital and bed statistics, contact and helplines, and notifications. It also displays unofficial patient tracing data, unofficial statewide information, and unofficial patient travel history. Data is sourced from The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare as the official source and The India COVID-19 Tracker as an unofficial source.
UK Coronavirus Data – The UK Coronavirus Data API serves as a data crawler to get COVID-19 figures from The National Health Service official website.
Mathdroid Covid-19 – The Mathdroid Covid-19 API returns COVID-19 global data from The JHU CSSE. Routes contain global summaries, global cases, cases per day/region/country, deaths, and global recovered patients.
Ghana COVID 19 – The Ghana COVID 19 API returns data about COVID-19 cases in Ghana and the world. Information includes confirmed and recovered cases. This API is built by independent developer Zakaria Mohammed.
COVID2019 – COVID2019-API provides information about COVID-19. The API provides data on confirmed cases, deaths, recovered cases, and affected countries. This information is updated on a daily basis, and is provided as timeseries data.
COVID19 Real-Time Data – The COVID19 Real-Time Data API provides updated information related to the coronavirus disease including the total count of cases, task force data in the US, travel health notices, cases in all US states, and fatality rates by age and sex.
Robert-Koch Institut COVID-19 Data – An API for the spread of COVID in Germany and worldwide. Case numbers and deaths are available via the API.
COVID Tracking Project API – The COVID Tracking Project is a volunteer effort, maintained through a partnership of The Atlantic and the founder of Related Sciences, that aims to be the most reliable source of state-level testing data through time. A RESTful API is available that tracks data on a state level as well as for the entire US. Additionally, a GraphQL version of the API is also available.
Coronavirus Tracker API – The Coronavirus Tracker is a simple API for tracking the COVID-19 outbreak that comes from Norwegian developer ExpDev. Users can query the RESTful API to get data about confirmed cases, deaths and the number of recovered patients. Data sources include the JHU CSSE, and the Conference of State Bank Supervisors. Community SDKs are also available in eight languages.
Covidapi.info API – The covidapi.info API builds upon the COVID-19 dataset of the JHU CSSE. The data, originally in CSV format has been standardized and converted into queryable REST API endpoints. The endpoints are heavily cached and updated three times a day with a response time of sub 100 milliseconds. This API was built by developer Saiprasad Balasubramanian and contributors.
Health Promotion Bureau COVID-19 API – The Health Promotion Bureau (HPB) is a government agency in Sri Lanka charged with promoting health education and publicizing health information. The HPB has released an API that aims to make accurate information about COVID-19 patients, updated in real-time, available to the media. It is a RESTful API with responses formatted in JSON
Springer Open Access API – The Springer Open Access API provides metadata and full-text content for more than 649,000 online documents from Springer Nature open access, including BioMed Central and SpringerOpen journals. The API offers access to the latest available research, evidence, and data. Any COVID related content is currently free.
Coronavirus API – The CoronaVirus REST API returns the current cases and more information about COVID-19. This API is free to use and requires no authentication. The API returns JSON formatted responses. The API supports country-specific responses. Additionally, a Node.js SDK is available to developers.
Nubentos COVID-19 Tracking API – This API is from the self-proclaimed API marketplace for health, and it aims to provide valuable resources for tracking the novel coronavirus. It provides developers access to data collected from global health organizations and local administrations including the World Health Organization (WHO), US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (ECDC), China’s National Health Commission, and the Chinese Website DXY. You can read here for our coverage of the API.
Health Gorilla Diagnostic Network API – Health Gorilla, a provider of clinical data interoperability, recently released this API to allow providers to submit orders for laboratory or radiology tests and receive the results electronically from vendors such as Labcorp, Quest Diagnostics, and Bioreference. The API can now be used to place COVID-19 test orders.
New South Wales Covid 19 Cases API – This API, from developer Adam Lusted, provides the latest data about the coronavirus outbreak in New South Wales, Australia. Developers can use GET calls to query the number of confirmed cases, cases under investigation, cases acquired overseas, cases under investigation, and their respective reference sources.
Smartable AI COVID-19 Stats and News API– Smartable AI is a company that uses AI to fight misinformation, curate content and put information in order. It’s free COVID-19 Stats and News API offers recent and historic COVID-19 stats and news information per country or state. This is done in close to real-time by using AI to gather information from a number of data sources. Check out ProgrammableWeb‘s full coverage of the API.
COVID-19 GraphQL API– The first GraphQL API focused on the coronavirus comes from Ryan Lindskog. It enables mutable queries about COVID-19 and supports time-series data associated with deaths and cases by country. Additionally, the API returns the most recent confirmed cases per country. Data comes from the JHU CSSE.
Health API – This is a RESTful API that also leverages JHU CSSE as its data source. It returns aggregated statistics (with total confirmed cases, deaths, and recovered), and country statistics.
TheVirusTracker Coronavirus Data API – TheVirusTracker is a real-time service that tracks the coronavirus and provides updated news and data from outlets worldwide. The API is a free-to-use service that offers four data options related to COVID-19: global stats, country stats, full timeline, and country timeline.
Octoparse – Octoparse is a web scraping tool that includes an API for retrieving extracted data and using it in an application. Octoparse recently created a “recipe” that lets users extract live data from China Healthcare Department’s database.
GHO OData API – With the GHO portal, users can query the World Health Organization’s data and statistics content. Data available includes various health indicators and the data associated with them, and dimensions such as education level and the data associated with them. The API uses the Open Data Protocol (OData) and supports both JSON and ATOM data formats.
ReliefWeb API– ReliefWeb is a humanitarian information service provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Content on this site including the latest reports, maps, and infographics from trusted sources, is delivered through the API. The API was used to create a daily map that tracks the outbreak among citizens of the EU.
The ReliefWeb API is used to create a daily map tracking the coronavirus outbreak. Image: OCHA
Aylien News API– This API isn’t specifically aimed at tracking the coronavirus, but it is used to monitor worldwide news outlets in real-time to provide users with a news data feed. The Aylien team created a visualization that follows the spread of news coverage since the start of the year. The team used the News API to “map and analyze media reaction to the outbreak, plotting where and when the major events and announcements occurred.” The API itself returns parsed and analyzed news articles as JSON objects.
The Aylien News API was used to create a visualization showing the spread of news coverage of the virus outbreak. Source: Aylien blog
OpenCage Geocoder API – This is another API that isn’t directly related to tracking data about the coronavirus. Instead OpenCage Geocoder provides forward and reverse geocoding services via a RESTful API. The Coronavirus Global Outbreak Monitor is a dashboard that pulls data from several sources to visualize and track the most recent reported cases on a daily basis. This dashboard uses the OpenCage Geocoder API to call the coordinates of new cases of the disease. Interested developers can learn about how the dashboard was built.
Editor’s Note: The article was originally published by Wendell Santos, the editor at ProgrammableWeb.com. Check back there as the article will continue to be updated as new APIs related to COVID-19 are made available.
