Open data for COVID-19 policy analysis and mapping

Abstract

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded in the spring of 2020, governments around the world began to implement policies to mitigate and manage the outbreak. Significant research efforts were deployed to track and analyse these policies in real-time to better inform the response. While much of the policy analysis focused narrowly on social distancing measures designed to slow the spread of disease, here, we present a dataset focused on capturing the breadth of policy types implemented by jurisdictions globally across the whole-of-government. COVID Analysis and Mapping of Policies (COVID AMP) includes nearly 50,000 policy measures from 150 countries, 124 intermediate areas, and 235 local areas between January 2020 and June 2022. With up to 40 structured and unstructured characteristics encoded per policy, as well as the original source and policy text, this dataset provides a uniquely broad capture of the governance strategies for pandemic response, serving as a critical data source for future work in legal epidemiology and political science.

Harmonizing government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic

“…This article shows how data harmonization, the process of making comparable and compatible conceptually similar data, can create a more comprehensive dataset of COVID-19 PHSM relative to any single dataset alone. Specifically, this article introduces a novel, rigorous methodology for harmonizing COVID-19 PHSM data from December 31, 2019 until September 21, 2021 for the 8 largest existing PHSM tracking efforts: ACAPS COVID-19 Government Measures (ACAPS) 2 COVID Analysis and Mapping of Policies (COVID AMP) 3 , 4 Canadian Dataset of COVID-19 Interventions (CIHI) 5 CoronaNet Research Project COVID-19 Government Response Event Dataset (CoronaNet) 6 , 7 Johns Hopkins Health Intervention Tracking for COVID-19 (HIT-COVID) 8 , 9 Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) 10 World Health Organization EURO (WHO EURO) dataset on COVID-19 policies (retrieved from the WHO Public Health and Safety Measures (WHO PHSM) 11 ) US Center for Disease Control (WHO CDC) dataset on COVID-19 policies (retrieved from the WHO Public Health and Safety Measures (WHO PHSM) 11 ) …”