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owid / covid-19-data

Data on COVID-19 (coronavirus) cases, deaths, hospitalizations, tests • All countries • Updated daily by Our World in Data
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus
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New deaths/ New deaths per million #476

Closed givan94 closed 3 years ago

givan94 commented 3 years ago

Dears,

I've just noticed that the series new_deaths and new_deaths_per_million contain negative values (see for instance Sweden, Ireland or France among many others).

How should I interpret these values? Is this a measurement error or a correction?

Thanks in advance!

edomt commented 3 years ago

Hi @givan94

See our README: https://github.com/owid/covid-19-data/tree/master/public/data

Confirmed cases and deaths: our data comes from the COVID-19 Data Repository by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU). We discuss how and when JHU collects and publishes this data here. The cases & deaths dataset is updated daily. Note: the number of cases or deaths reported by any institution—including JHU, the WHO, the ECDC and others—on a given day does not necessarily represent the actual number on that date. This is because of the long reporting chain that exists between a new case/death and its inclusion in statistics. This also means that negative values in cases and deaths can sometimes appear when a country corrects historical data, because it had previously overestimated the number of cases/deaths. Alternatively, large changes can sometimes (although rarely) be made to a country's entire time series if JHU decides (and has access to the necessary data) to correct values retrospectively.