Coronavirus in the UK API

Free to Use
76 B
Measured Score 0 50 100 Speed 29/30 Consistency 8/20 Security 20/20 Browser access 15/15 Transparency 4/15 TESTED 2026-08-10

Overview

The Coronavirus in the UK API provides official UK Government data on Covid-19 cases, deaths, and vaccinations broken down by region and nation. It is free to use with no API key required, making it easy for beginners to access real government health data. Use it to build charts, monitor trends, or explore epidemiological data for England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

Beginner Tip

The UKHSA dashboard API supports filtering by area type (nation, region, utla, ltla) and metric — start with a broad area_type=nation query to understand the data structure before drilling down to smaller regions.

Measurement Record

What actually happened when we called this API from our own infrastructure. Every value below was recorded by the request, not copied from the provider's documentation.

Request
GET https://api.ukhsa-dashboard.data.gov.uk/themes/infectious_disease/sub_themes/respiratory_viruses/topics/COVID-19/geography_types/Nation/geographies/England/metrics/COVID-19_deaths_ONSByDay?page_size=5
Result
HTTP 200 · application/json · 52 bytes
Response time
33 ms (median of 3) · fastest 25 ms
Transport
TLSv1.3 · TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 · certificate issued by Amazon
Browser CORS
Allowed — Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Served by
undisclosed
Recorded
2026-08-10

Fields Returned

Top-level fields present in the response we captured, with the type and value we actually received.

Field Type Value received
count integer 0
next null null
previous null null
results array [0 items]

Captured Response

Captured from a real request to https://api.ukhsa-dashboard.data.gov.uk/themes/infectious_disease/sub_themes/respiratory_viruses/topics/COVID-19/geography_types/Nation/geographies/England/metrics/COVID-19_deaths_ONSByDay?page_size=5 on 2026-08-10. Long arrays and nested objects are truncated to keep the shape readable.

JSON Response · Captured
{
  "count": 0,
  "next": null,
  "previous": null,
  "results": []
}

Field Reference

count Total number of records available for the queried metric and geography.
results List of data points for the requested metric, each representing a date and value.

Implementation Example

Calls a real endpoint of this API. Replace any placeholder credentials with your own key.

Request
const url = "https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/developers-guide";
const response = await fetch(url);
if (!response.ok) throw new Error(`Request failed: ${response.status}`);
const data = await response.json();
console.log(data);

What Can You Build?

Note: These code examples are AI-generated and unverified. Always refer to the official API documentation for accurate usage.

How This API Fails

We deliberately sent this API a broken request and recorded exactly what came back on 2026-08-10. Knowing the shape of an error before you hit it makes error handling much easier to write.

HTTP 404 Requesting a path that does not exist text/html

Returned an HTML error page rather than JSON — worth knowing if your client assumes every response can be parsed as JSON.

Common Errors & Troubleshooting

Generated guidance based on this API's documentation, not observed by us. Treat it as a starting point and check against the provider's own error reference.

404 Not Found The geography or metric name is misspelled or uses incorrect casing.
Browse the UKHSA dashboard website to find exact geography names and metric codes — they are case-sensitive.
Empty data array The date range or metric combination has no available data for the selected region.
Try a broader geography type like Nation before querying Lower Tier Local Authority (ltla) level data.
Slow response Requests for large date ranges with fine-grained geographic breakdowns return a lot of data.
Use the page_size parameter to limit results and paginate through data incrementally.

Measured Score Breakdown

Live HTTP request to the API endpoint

Speed 29/30
Consistency 8/20
Security 20/20
Browser access 15/15
Transparency 4/15
Endpoint Response Time 33ms

Fully tested on Aug 10, 2026

Technical Specifications

Auth No Auth
HTTPS REQUIRED
CORS UNKNOWN
Category Health
Difficulty Beginner
Endpoint last called: 2026-08-10

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