Does anyone know where I can access the live, machine readable data of Covid 19 cases by country?
Do I need to build this out myself by parsing the html of WHO or such?
1) We don't know what the fatality rate is yet. If you have a super-accurate count of deaths to covid-19 you can't work out the true infection rate because estimates of lethality range from about 0.% to 3%.
2) You can't get a super accurate count of deaths, and certainly not a real time count. Looking at the UK we have "deaths of people who tested positive for Covid-19 who died in hospital". We're not testing people, even if they're in hospital. There's a presumption that if you have certain symptoms then you have covid-19. So there's a bunch of people being treated for covid-19, who die from covid-19, but who were not tested as having covid-19. Their deaths won't be in these daily figures. And then we have deaths outside hospital: covid-19 is currently ripping through care homes. Maybe 50%[1] of covid deaths are happening in care homes, but if they're not counted in the daily stats you're missing all of them. The UK does have a more accurate figure from the Office For National Statistics, but there's quite a lot of lag in those figures. Someone dies, a doctor certifies the death, that's registered, and then sent to ONS for coding.
3) Everywhere is counting deaths and cases differently. I've talked about the UK and that's just 4 (or 1) countries.
Here's the UK daily covid dashboard: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/f94c3c9...
Here's the Office For National Statistics page talking about the different ways of counting death: https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2020/03/31/counting-deaths-involving...
Here's the NHS England_Improvement Covid-19 stats page, with excel files: https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas...
For worldwide there's the John Hopkins dashboard: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
I'm thinking of making the best guess on the fatality rate, time to double, etc, and allowing people to tweak the variables. And using the officially reported death numbers.