Objective

Daily COVID-19 data reported by the World Health Organization (WHO) may provide the basis for political ad hoc decisions including travel restrictions. Data reported by countries, however, is heterogeneous and metrics to evaluate its quality are scarce. In this work, we analyzed COVID-19 case counts provided by WHO and developed tools to evaluate country-specific reporting behaviors.

Methods

In this retrospective cross-sectional study, COVID-19 data reported daily to WHO from 3rd January 2020 until 14th June 2021 were analyzed. We proposed the concepts of binary reporting rate and relative reporting behavior and performed descriptive analyses for all countries with these metrics. We developed a score to evaluate the consistency of incidence and binary reporting rates. Further, we performed spectral clustering of the binary reporting rate and relative reporting behavior to identify salient patterns in these metrics.

Results

Our final analysis included 222 countries and regions. Reporting scores varied between -0.17, indicating discrepancies between incidence and binary reporting rate, and 1.0 suggesting high consistency of these two metrics. Median reporting score for all countries was 0.71 (IQR 0.55 to 0.87). Descriptive analyses of the binary reporting rate and relative reporting behavior showed constant reporting with a slight “weekend effect” for most countries, while spectral clustering demonstrated that some countries had even more complex reporting patterns.

Conclusion

The majority of countries reported COVID-19 cases when they did have cases to report. The identification of a slight “weekend effect” suggests that COVID-19 case counts reported in the middle of the week may represent the best data basis for political ad hoc decisions. A few countries, however, showed unusual or highly irregular reporting that might require more careful interpretation. Our score system and cluster analyses might be applied by epidemiologists advising policymakers to consider country-specific reporting behaviors in political ad hoc decisions.

Data collection

COVID-19 data was downloaded from WHO. Using a public repository, we have added the countries' full names to the WHO data set using the two-letter abbreviations for each country to merge both data sets. The provided COVID-19 data covers January 2020 until June 2021. We uploaded the final data set used for the analyses of this paper.

Data processing

We processed data using a Jupyter Notebook with a Python kernel and publically available external libraries. This upload contains the required Jupyter Notebook (reporting_behavior.ipynb) with all analyses and some additional work, a README, and the conda environment yml (env.yml).

Any text editor including Microsoft Excel and their free alternatives can open the uploaded CSV file.

Any web browser and some code editors (like the freely available Visual Studio Code) can show the uploaded Jupyter Notebook if the required Python environment is set up correctly.