Covid-19 Government Response API

Health / No Auth Required Beginner HTTPS CORS

Free to Use

82 A

Metadata Score Metadata estimate · not endpoint-tested

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Overview

The Covid-19 Government Response API tracks policy measures taken by governments worldwide during the pandemic, such as lockdowns, travel restrictions, and vaccination campaigns. Data is sourced from Oxford University's Blavatnik School of Government and is updated regularly. It is a great free resource for researchers, students, and developers building public health dashboards.

Beginner Tip

This dataset uses a CSV/spreadsheet format rather than a typical JSON REST API, so you may need to parse or convert the data before using it in your app.

Available Data

The kind of data this API exposes, based on its documentation. We could not call the endpoint to confirm the exact field names.

track name and artist

album metadata

audio preview URLs

popularity score

genre classification

case counts and statistics

Example Response

Illustrative shape only — we were not able to call this endpoint (it requires credentials or exposes no public sample URL), so the fields below show the kind of data this API returns rather than a recorded response.

JSON Response · Illustrative

{
  "name": "Bohemian Rhapsody",
  "artist": "Queen",
  "album": "A Night at the Opera",
  "duration_ms": 354000,
  "popularity": 92,
  "preview_url": "https://p.scdn.co/mp3-preview/..."
}

Field Reference

CountryName Full name of the country for the data row.

CountryCode ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country code (e.g., USA, GBR).

Date Date of the observation in YYYYMMDD format.

StringencyIndex Composite index (0-100) of overall policy stringency across all tracked measures.

C1_School closing Ordinal value indicating school closure policy level (0 = no measures, 3 = require closing all levels).

Implementation Example

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

Request

const url = "https://covidtracker.bsg.ox.ac.uk/";
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.

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.

Large file download timeout The dataset file can be several megabytes; slow connections may time out.

✓ Use streaming downloads or download the file in a background job, then process it locally.

CSV parsing errors Some fields may contain commas within quoted strings, causing naive parsers to misread columns.

✓ Use a proper CSV parsing library (e.g., PapaParse in JS or the csv module in Python) that handles quoted fields correctly.

Stale data The dataset is updated periodically, not in real time.

✓ Check the dataset's last-updated timestamp and cache locally to avoid hammering the source server.

Metadata Score Breakdown

Estimated from metadata — endpoint not independently tested

This score is estimated from observable metadata — HTTPS support, authentication model, declared CORS, and documentation reachability — because the API requires authentication or exposes no publicly testable endpoint. The five-signal breakdown is only shown for live-tested APIs.

Metadata estimate · endpoint not independently tested

How is this scored? →