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COVID-19 testing policies

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COVID-19

What you should know about this indicator

Possible categories:

  • 0: no testing policy
  • 1: only those who both (a) have symptoms AND (b) meet specific criteria (eg key workers, admitted to hospital, came into contact with a known case, returned from overseas)
  • 2: testing of anyone showing Covid-19 symptoms
  • 3: open public testing (eg "drive through" testing available to asymptomatic people)
COVID-19 testing policies
Record government policy on who has access to testing. Note: this records policies about testing for current infection (PCR tests) not testing for immunity (antibody test).
Source
Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford (2023) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
August 1, 2024

Related research and writing

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Coronavirus (COVID-19) Testing

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
Thumbnail for article '17 key charts to understand the COVID-19 pandemic'

17 key charts to understand the COVID-19 pandemic

Saloni Dattani and Lucas Rodés-Guirao

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

The Oxford Covid-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) collected information on which pandemic response measures were enacted by governments, and when. During the pandemic this helped decision-makers and citizens understand governmental responses in a consistent way, aiding efforts to fight the pandemic. Now that covid-19 is no longer designated a public health emergency of international concern, the data can be used for research purposes and to prepare for future pandemics.

The OxCGRT systematically collected information on several different common policy responses governments took over 2020, 2021, and 2022, recorded these policies on a scale to reflect the extent of government action, and aggregates these scores into a suite of policy indices. We also collected differentiated policies data where different policies apply to people who were vaccinated and non-vaccinated.

The OxCGRT reports publicly available information on 24 policy indicators and a miscellaneous notes field of government response organised into four groups:

  • C: containment and closure policies
  • E: economic policies
  • H: health system policies
  • V: vaccination policies

To help make sense of the data, we have produced four indices that aggregate the data into a single number. For more details about how the indices are comprised, see the section 'Calculation of policy indices' in our documentation. Each of these indices reports a number between 0 to 100 that reflects the level of the government's response along certain dimensions:

  • overall government response index (all indicators)
  • containment and health index (all C and H indicators)
  • stringency index (all C indicators, plus H1 which records public information campaigns)
  • economic support index (all E indicators)

These indices are a measure of how many of the relevant policy types a government has acted upon, and to what degree. The index cannot say whether a government's policy has been implemented effectively.

Because of the complexity of the dataset, it is published across 27 CSV files. Our technical documentation (https://github.com/OxCGRT/covid-policy-dataset/blob/main/documentation_and_codebook.md) contains all the information users need to navigate and use the data.

Retrieved on
August 1, 2024
Retrieved from
https://github.com/OxCGRT/covid-policy-dataset
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
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

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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.

Read about our data pipeline

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  • 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.
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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: COVID-19 testing policies”, 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 Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-19-testing-policy [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:

Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford (2023) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford (2023) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “COVID-19 testing policies” [dataset]. Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, “Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT)” [original data]. Retrieved November 18, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-19-testing-policy