Biweekly confirmed COVID-19 cases per million people
What you should know about this indicator
- Confirmed cases represent the number of laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infections as reported to WHO, but may not capture the true scale of infection due to varying testing strategies, case definitions, and underreporting.
- Data are presented by date of reporting rather than symptom onset, and retrospective updates or corrections by countries can lead to sudden spikes or negative values.
- Since WHO relies on Member State reporting, differences in local definitions, testing capacities, and reporting practices can affect international comparisons and trending over time.
- There are often large differences in the population size between countries. Therefore, to compare cases between countries, it is more insightful to look at the number of confirmed cases as a rate per million people.
- We provide more detail on these points in Cases of COVID-19: background.
Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
How we process data at Our World in Data
All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
This indicator is estimated by normalizing by population. We have used daily population estimates, which leads to changes in the denominator between datapoints from different days. For instance, the denominator for January 1st will be different to the one on January 2nd.
Reuse this work
- All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
- All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.
Citations
How to cite this page
To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:
“Data Page: Biweekly confirmed COVID-19 cases per million people”, part of the following publication: 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 (2020) - “COVID-19 Pandemic”. Data adapted from World Health Organization, Various sources. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/biweekly-covid-cases-per-million-people [online resource]
How to cite this data
In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:
World Health Organization (2025); Population based on various sources (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Full citation
World Health Organization (2025); Population based on various sources (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Biweekly confirmed COVID-19 cases per million people” [dataset]. World Health Organization, “COVID-19 Dashboard WHO COVID-19 Dashboard - Daily cases and deaths”; Various sources, “Population” [original data]. Retrieved February 15, 2025 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/biweekly-covid-cases-per-million-people