I would like to deprecate this repo and encourage consumers to move to official upstream data sources. I'd like to stop updates in a month's time (1 August 2020).

When I started curating UK COVID-19 data in early March, numbers for people tested, confirmed cases, and deaths were only available on web pages, and did not provide a historical timeseries. That has now changed, with all the UK health agencies (except Northern Ireland, see below) providing machine-readable historical datasets. In fact, most of the datasets are now much richer than the data provided in this repository, including data such as number of hospitalizations and calls to helplines. For that reason, people who are working with COVID-19 data will typically be using the upstream sources anyway, to access this richer data.

As a case in point, the debate over Pillar 2 data has meant that the confirmed case numbers of England have become potentially misleading, so I have stopped providing them from this repository (#67). The data is still available from https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/downloads/csv/coronavirus-cases_latest.csv, and in the last few days PHE have published week-level case numbers for England that contain Pillar 2 data (see the spreadsheet on this page: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-covid-19-surveillance-reports). The hope is that they will publish this information at daily granularity, but until they do this illustrates the fact that working with COVID data is messy and necessarily involves working with multiple sources of data, even with efforts like this one.

The lack of machine-readable data for Northern Ireland is another unfortunate reality, and while I have been able to work around this problem in the past by using an undocumented backend API to get the case numbers for LGDs, this stopped working recently in such a way that it started reporting incorrect data. I feel it is wrong to rely on this undocumented API, given how it can silently break, and that people who want machine-readable data should make the case to the NI Department for Health (I was not successful in my request to them, see #63).

The data sources that this repo relies on are documented here: https://github.com/tomwhite/covid-19-uk-data#data-sources. Most consumers of the data should be able to move to these sources fairly easily. Most of them are in CSV or JSON format, at known locations, and with stable formats. There may be some challenges though - URLs that change every day, or parsing XLSX (for Wales) on some platforms - spring to mind, but these are the kind of things that I hope can be fixed by the community or the official providers.