COVID Data APIs for predictive analytics
With the entire world in the middle of the pandemic, everyone wants to help somehow with whatever skillset they possess including software engineers. Many engineers want to use their skill set to build some forecasting model or just build a simple dashboard that visualizes the current statistics. But to do anything of such sort we all need data. Data was, is and I believe always will be playing the most crucial role in enabling a developer to achieve wonders. I know a lot of you are facing a similar issue of not knowing the right data source to fetch accurate data and I am right there with you! So, I went on a search hunting for some good resources and was lucky enough to find this list of APIs recommended by Postman:
https://covid-19-apis.postman.com/
For those of you who don’t know Postman is the collaboration platform for API development, used by 10 million developers and 500,000 companies worldwide. It’s an elegant, flexible tool for building connected software via APIs quickly, easily, and accurately.
This list consists of many credible sources like WHO, CDC, ECDC and so on… along with some volunteer-driven sources which are frequently updated. I have looked into and cross-checked some resources myself:
- Coronavirus COVID19 API (covid19api.com):
This API gives details about current cases both globally and also country-specific. It has grouped the data in different ways and has the following endpoints among some others accordingly:
1. Default: If you send a get request directly to the URL: https://api.covid19api.com/ then you will get the list of paths you can access and what kind of data you will get from each path.
2. Summary: If you send a get request directly to the URL: https://api.covid19api.com/summary then you will get a summary of new and total cases per country updated daily.
3. Countries: If you send a get request directly to the URL: https://api.covid19api.com/countries then you will get all the available countries and provinces, as well as the country slug for per country requests.
4. Day One Live: If you send a get request directly to the URL: https://api.covid19api.com /dayone/country/india/status/confirmed/live then you will get all cases by case type for a country from the first recorded case with the latest record being the live count but the country must be the Slug from /countries or /summary and the cases must be one of: confirmed, recovered, deaths.
5. By Country Total: If you send a get request directly to the URL: https://api.covid19api.com /total/country/india/status/confirmed then you will get all cases by case type for a country. Country must be the slug from /countries or /summary. Cases must be one of: confirmed, recovered, deaths.
You can check this API out yourself here:
- COVID19-India API:
This is an unofficial volunteer-driven API endpoint that provides the COVID-19 statistics of India. It has four endpoints in total and I personally looked into the following two:
1. https://api.covid19india.org/data.json: which gives the national time-series, state-wise stats and test counts. It gives you a date-wise and state-wise grouped data consisting of confirmed case, deaths and recovered cases among other things
2. https://api.covid19india.org/state_district_wise.json: This gives State-district-wise data. It essentially provides data of confirmed cases in each district in each state.
You can check this API out yourself here:
https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/10724784/SzYXXKmA?version=latest
There are other such APIs which give you data specific to some countries as well. Some of these APIs also mention when they were last updated which makes it easier for you to know how recent that data is. From what I have seen so far the data from these APIs seem to be accurate and pretty up-to-date but still a few of them are volunteer-driven I would strongly suggest you cross-checking them yourself using Postman before you use it any application that you are trying to build.
If I have missed anything or if you have any other good resources that you would like to share then please let me know in the comments.
