Week by week change in confirmed COVID-19 cases
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.
- We provide more detail on these points in Cases of COVID-19: background.
Related research and writing
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.
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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: Week by week change in confirmed COVID-19 cases”, 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://ourworldindata.org/grapher/weekly-growth-covid-cases [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) – processed by Our World in Data
Full citation
World Health Organization (2025) – processed by Our World in Data. “Week by week change in confirmed COVID-19 cases” [dataset]. World Health Organization, “COVID-19 Dashboard WHO COVID-19 Dashboard - Daily cases and deaths” [original data]. Retrieved February 24, 2025 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/weekly-growth-covid-cases