TY  - JOUR
AU  - Liu, Han
AU  - Zong, Huiying
AU  - Yang, Yang
AU  - Schwebel, David C
AU  - Xie, Bin
AU  - Ning, Peishan
AU  - Rao, Zhenzhen
AU  - Li, Li
AU  - Hu, Guoqing
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/2/6
TI  - Consistency of Daily Number of Reported COVID-19 Cases in 191 Countries From 2020 to 2022: Comparative Analysis of 2 Major Data Sources
JO  - JMIR Public Health Surveill
SP  - e65439
VL  - 11
KW  - COVID-19
KW  - pandemic
KW  - data consistency
KW  - World Health Organization
KW  - data quality
AB  - Background: The COVID-19 pandemic represents one of the most challenging public health emergencies in recent world history, causing about 7.07 million deaths globally by September 24, 2024. Accurate, timely, and consistent data are critical for early response to situations like the COVID-19 pandemic. Objective: This study aimed to evaluate consistency of daily reported COVID-19 cases in 191 countries from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CSSE) and the World Health Organization (WHO) dashboards during 2020‐2022. Methods: We retrieved data concerning new daily COVID-19 cases in 191 countries covered by both data sources from January 22, 2020, to December 31, 2022. The ratios of numbers of daily reported cases from the 2 sources were calculated to measure data consistency. We performed simple linear regression to examine significant changes in the ratio of numbers of daily reported cases during the study period. Results: Of 191 WHO member countries, only 60 displayed excellent data consistency in the number of daily reported COVID-19 cases between the WHO and JHU CSSE dashboards (mean ratio 0.9-1.1). Data consistency changed greatly across the 191 countries from 2020 to 2022 and differed across 4 types of countries, categorized by income. Data inconsistency between the 2 data sources generally decreased slightly over time, both for the 191 countries combined and within the 4 types of income-defined countries. The absolute relative difference between the 2 data sources increased in 84 countries, particularly for Malta (R2=0.25), Montenegro (R2=0.30), and the United States (R2=0.29), but it decreased significantly in 40 countries. Conclusions: The inconsistency between the 2 data sources warrants further research. Construction of public health surveillance and data collection systems for public health emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic should be strengthened in the future. 
SN  - 2369-2960
UR  - https://publichealth.jmir.org/2025/1/e65439
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2196/65439
DO  - 10.2196/65439
ID  - info:doi/10.2196/65439
ER  -