Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19)

Edouard Mathieu; Hannah Ritchie; Lucas Rodés-Guirao; Cameron Appel; Charlie Giattino; Joe Hasell; Bobbie Macdonald; Saloni Dattani; Diana Beltekian; Esteban Ortiz-Ospina; Max Roser

COVID-19: Testing and Contact Tracing

Research and data: Edouard Mathieu, Hannah Ritchie, Lucas Rodés-Guirao, Cameron Appel, Daniel Gavrilov, Charlie Giattino, Joe Hasell, Bobbie Macdonald, Saloni Dattani, Diana Beltekian, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, and Max Roser

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Testing policy

This interactive chart maps government policies on testing for COVID-19. Note that this relates to PCR testing for the virus only; it does not include non-PCR, antibody testing.

Countries are grouped into four categories:

No testing policy
Testing only for those who both (a) have symptoms AND (b) meet specific criteria (e.g. key workers, admitted to hospital, came into contact with a known case, returned from overseas)
Testing of anyone showing COVID-19 symptoms
Open public testing (e.g “drive through” testing available to asymptomatic people)

Contact tracing

This interactive chart maps government policies on contract tracing for COVID-19.

Learn more about the data source, the Oxford Coronavirus Government Response Tracker

The research we provide on policy responses is sourced from the Oxford Coronavirus Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT).¹

The tracker presents data collected from public sources by a team of over one hundred Oxford University students and staff from every part of the world.

OxCGRT collects publicly available information on 17 indicators of government responses, spanning containment and closure policies (such as school closures and restrictions in movement); economic policies; and health system policies (such as testing regimes). Further details on how these metrics are measured and collected is available in the project’s working paper.

The data presented here is taken directly from the OxCGRT project; Our World in Data do not track policy responses ourselves, and do not make additions to the tracker dataset.

These charts are regularly updated based on the latest version of the response tracker.

OxCGRT is an ongoing collation project of live data. If you see any inaccuracies in the underlying data, or for specific feedback on the analysis or another aspect of the project please contact OxCGRT team. See the tracker’s notes and guidance on data quality.

Explore other policy responses to COVID-19

COVID-19 policy government stringency index

COVID-19 policy school and workplace closures

COVID-19 policy cancellation of public events and gatherings

COVID-19 policy stay at home restrictions

COVID-19 policy public information campaigns

COVID-19 policy international and domestic travel

COVID-19 policy testing and contact tracing

COVID-19 policy income support and debt relief

Endnotes

Thomas Hale , Noam Angrist , Rafael Goldszmidt , Beatriz Kira , Anna Petherick , Toby Phillips, Samuel Webster, Emily Cameron-Blake , Laura Hallas, Saptarshi Majumdar, and Helen Tatlow. (2021). “A global panel database of pandemic policies (Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker).” Nature Human Behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01079-8.

Cite this work

Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this topic page, please also cite the underlying data sources. This topic page can be cited as:

Edouard Mathieu, Hannah Ritchie, Lucas Rodés-Guirao, Cameron Appel, Charlie Giattino, Joe Hasell, Bobbie Macdonald, Saloni Dattani, Diana Beltekian, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser (2020) - "Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19)". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus' [Online Resource]

BibTeX citation

@article{owidcoronavirus,
    author = {Edouard Mathieu and Hannah Ritchie and Lucas Rodés-Guirao and Cameron Appel and Charlie Giattino and Joe Hasell and Bobbie Macdonald and Saloni Dattani and Diana Beltekian and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser},
    title = {Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19)},
    journal = {Our World in Data},
    year = {2020},
    note = {https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus}
}

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