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Data

Weekly confirmed COVID-19 deaths

See all data and research on:
COVID-19Global Health

What you should know about this indicator

  • The actual death toll from COVID-19 is likely to be higher than the number of confirmed deaths – this is due to limited testing, , challenges in determining the cause of death, and disruptions during the pandemic. The difference between reported confirmed deaths and actual deaths varies between countries.
  • Excess mortality is a more comprehensive measure of the total mortality impact of the pandemic, compared to the number of confirmed COVID-19 deaths. This is because it captures not only confirmed deaths, but also COVID-19 deaths that were not accurately diagnosed.
  • COVID-19 deaths may be recorded in different ways between countries (e.g., some countries may only count hospital deaths, whilst others also include deaths in homes).
  • Data are presented by the date of reporting rather than symptom onset, and retrospective updates by countries can sometimes lead to sudden spikes or even negative values.
  • WHO encourages weekly reporting to reduce inconsistencies in daily reporting frequencies across countries and help minimize the risk of misinterpreting periods of zero reporting as zero deaths.
  • We provide more detail on these points in Deaths from COVID-19: background.
Weekly confirmed COVID-19 deaths
Cumulative number of confirmed deaths over the previous week. Due to varying protocols and challenges in the attribution of the cause of death, the number of confirmed deaths may not accurately represent the true number of deaths caused by COVID-19.
Source
World Health Organization (2026) – processed by Our World in Data
Last updated
April 1, 2026
Next expected update
May 2026
Unit
deaths

Related research and writing

Coronavirus (COVID-19) Deaths

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

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

World Health Organization – COVID-19 Dashboard

Daily COVID-19 cases and deaths by date reported to WHO.

From the 31 December 2019 to the 21 March 2020, WHO collected the numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths through official communications under the International Health Regulations (IHR, 2005), complemented by monitoring the official ministries of health websites and social media accounts. Since 22 March 2020, global data is compiled through WHO region-specific dashboards, and/or aggregate count data reported to WHO headquarters.

WHO COVID-19 Dashboard is updated every Friday for the period of two weeks prior.

Counts primarily reflect laboratory-confirmed cases and deaths, based upon WHO case definitions; although some departures may exist due to local adaptations. Counts include both domestic and repatriated cases. Case detection, definitions, testing strategies, reporting practice, and lag times (e.g. time to case notification, and time to reporting of deaths) differ between countries, territories and areas. These factors, amongst others, influence the counts presented with variable under or overestimation of true case and death counts, and variable delays to reflecting these data at a global level.

All data represent date of reporting as opposed to date of symptom onset. All data are subject to continuous verification and may change based on retrospective updates to accurately reflect trends, changes in country case definitions and/or reporting practices. Significant data errors detected or reported to WHO may be corrected at more frequent intervals.

New case and death counts from the Region of the Americas Starting from the week commencing on 11 September 2023, the source of the data from the Region of the Americas was switched to the aggregated national surveillances, received through the COVID-19, Influenza, RSV and Other Respiratory Viruses program in the Americas. Data have been included retrospectively since 31 July 2023.

Rates <0.001 per 100,000 population may be rounded to 0.

Retrieved on
April 1, 2026
Retrieved from
https://covid19.who.int/
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.
WHO COVID-19 Dashboard. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2020. Available online: https://covid19.who.int/

Daily COVID-19 cases and deaths by date reported to WHO.

From the 31 December 2019 to the 21 March 2020, WHO collected the numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths through official communications under the International Health Regulations (IHR, 2005), complemented by monitoring the official ministries of health websites and social media accounts. Since 22 March 2020, global data is compiled through WHO region-specific dashboards, and/or aggregate count data reported to WHO headquarters.

WHO COVID-19 Dashboard is updated every Friday for the period of two weeks prior.

Counts primarily reflect laboratory-confirmed cases and deaths, based upon WHO case definitions; although some departures may exist due to local adaptations. Counts include both domestic and repatriated cases. Case detection, definitions, testing strategies, reporting practice, and lag times (e.g. time to case notification, and time to reporting of deaths) differ between countries, territories and areas. These factors, amongst others, influence the counts presented with variable under or overestimation of true case and death counts, and variable delays to reflecting these data at a global level.

All data represent date of reporting as opposed to date of symptom onset. All data are subject to continuous verification and may change based on retrospective updates to accurately reflect trends, changes in country case definitions and/or reporting practices. Significant data errors detected or reported to WHO may be corrected at more frequent intervals.

New case and death counts from the Region of the Americas Starting from the week commencing on 11 September 2023, the source of the data from the Region of the Americas was switched to the aggregated national surveillances, received through the COVID-19, Influenza, RSV and Other Respiratory Viruses program in the Americas. Data have been included retrospectively since 31 July 2023.

Rates <0.001 per 100,000 population may be rounded to 0.

Retrieved on
April 1, 2026
Retrieved from
https://covid19.who.int/
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.
WHO COVID-19 Dashboard. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2020. Available online: https://covid19.who.int/

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.

Read about our data pipeline

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: Weekly confirmed COVID-19 deaths”, 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. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260401-063313/grapher/weekly-covid-deaths.html [online resource] (archived on April 1, 2026).

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 (2026) – processed by Our World in Data

Full citation

World Health Organization (2026) – processed by Our World in Data. “Weekly confirmed COVID-19 deaths” [dataset]. World Health Organization, “COVID-19 Dashboard WHO COVID-19 Dashboard - Daily cases and deaths” [original data]. Retrieved April 1, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260401-063313/grapher/weekly-covid-deaths.html (archived on April 1, 2026).

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Data API

Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/weekly-covid-deaths.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/weekly-covid-deaths.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/weekly-covid-deaths.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/weekly-covid-deaths.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/weekly-covid-deaths.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/weekly-covid-deaths.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/weekly-covid-deaths.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/weekly-covid-deaths.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear