Covid Data Hub

In March 2020, COVID-19 cases were mounting and government restrictions were increasing across the globe to contain the pandemic. A group of clinical and technical experts at Imperial College London’s Institute of Global Health Innovation (IGHI) identified a gap in our understanding of the pandemic: we did not have consistent, reliable and timely data on how the population was responding to government guidelines and policies. 

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To address this gap, IGHI experts partnered with YouGov to launch a survey across 30 countries, areas and territories. Our aim was to understand people’s changing behaviours and attitudes in relation to the pandemic, whether the guidelines would have the intended impact on virus transmission and what the impacts of restrictions might be on society and on individuals.

 

Through partnerships with world-renowned academic and international organisations we have been able to enrich our survey with questions around life satisfaction, trust in government and confidence in health authorities.

This survey, which ran from April 2020 to March 2022 on a weekly/bi-weekly basis, has shed light on the complexity of changing behaviours and attitudes related to the pandemic over time. It has also allowed us to better understand differences across geographies and demographic groups.

 

Survey results are made publicly available through this interactive dashboard and the GitHub data download site, with the aim to enable researchers all across the globe to carry out their own analyses and develop novel findings.

Highlights, insights and understandings of these data have been disseminated through 45+ policy reports from IGHI, 80+ academic publications from IGHI and other researchers, communications from the World Health Organization, research from the International Monetary Fund, and the international press. 

 

Survey topics are wide ranging: they track

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• How attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines and boosters have changed

• Reasons why unvaccinated people have not had their COVID-19 vaccines

• How people’s approval of their government’s handling of the pandemic and their trust in their local health authorities have changed

• What protective measures (such as wearing a face mask or avoiding crowded spaces) people took up to protect themselves from COVID-19 and which ones people have stopped

• Life satisfaction, as measured by the team at the World Happiness Report

• How attitudes such as perceptions of severity and susceptibility to COVID changed over time

 

Data collection has now concluded and will no longer be regularly updated. Throughout the life cycle of the survey some countries could no longer be updated and others have been included since its inception.   Anonymised respondent level data is made available for members of the public, all public health and academic institutions globally at our GitHub site (https://github.com/YouGov-Data/covid-19-tracker) maintained for the benefit of the public by YouGov Plc.

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Our aim with this dashboard is to enable individuals, organisations, systems and governments to use the learning and insights gleaned in ongoing efforts against the COVID-19 pandemic, and in future health threats as they arise.