The COVID Tracking Project was a volunteer organization launched from The Atlantic and dedicated to collecting and publishing the data required to understand the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States. Our dataset was in use by national and local news organizations across the United States and by research projects and agencies worldwide.

On August 12, 2020, we launched the Long-Term-Care COVID Tracker with weekly data back to May 28, 2020, but the work of compiling the dataset began much earlier. In mid-April 2020, a team within The COVID Tracking Project started collecting long-term care data from every state that reported it. The aim of our work on long-term-care (LTC) data was to ensure that the pandemic’s impact on residents and workers in a broad range of LTC facilities was entered into the historical record.

Every Thursday evening until March 4, 2021, this dedicated team of volunteers gathered COVID-19 case and death data of long-term-care facility residents and staff from state and territory websites, recent press conferences and releases, and directly from state health department officials. We published this data every Friday as cumulative, current outbreak, and facility-level datasets. These datasets are available for download on our Download the Data page and, for each state and jurisdiction, on the Data by State pages.

These datasets aim to document facilities for seniors like nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and residential care homes. The data excludes, when possible, facilities not specifically for the elderly, like chemical dependency residential treatment centers, behavioral health residential facilities, and intermediate care facilities for individuals with intellectual disabilities.

This dataset was compiled by volunteers with The COVID Tracking Project. Every Thursday evening until March 4, 2021, this dedicated team of volunteers gathered COVID-19 case and death data of long-term-care facility residents and staff from state and territory websites, recent press conferences and releases, and directly from state health department officials. We published this data every Friday as cumulative, current outbreak, and facility-level datasets. These datasets are available for download on our Download the Data page and, for each state and jurisdiction, on the Data by State pages.

These datasets aim to document facilities for seniors like nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and residential care homes. The data excludes, when possible, facilities not specifically for the elderly, like chemical dependency residential treatment centers, behavioral health residential facilities, and intermediate care facilities for individuals with intellectual disabilities.

We offer thanks and heartfelt gratitude for the labor and sacrifice of our volunteers. Volunteers on the Long-term Care team who granted us permission to use their name publicly are listed in the VOLUNTEERS.md file.

Dataset includes README file that describes all datapoints.