The UK Government has been holding daily press briefings in order to provide updates on the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and outline any new measures being put in place to deal with the outbreak. Boris Johnson announced that the UK would be going into lockdown in a broadcast on March 23 which was watched live by more than half of the respondents to a daily survey. On June 28, just 12 percent of respondents said they had not watched or read about the previous day's briefing. For further information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, please visit our dedicated Facts and Figures page.

The Coronavirus (COVID-19) Press Briefings Corpus is a work in progress to collect and present in a machine readable text dataset of the daily briefings from around the world by government authorities. During the peak of the pandemic, most countries around the world informed their citizens of the status of the pandemic (usually involving an update on the number of infection cases, number of deaths) and other policy-oriented decisions about dealing with the health crisis, such as advice about what to do to reduce the spread of the epidemic.

Usually daily briefings did not occur on a Sunday.

At the moment the dataset includes:

UK/England: Daily Press Briefings by UK Government between 12 March 2020 - 01 June 2020 (70 briefings in total)

Scotland: Daily Press Briefings by Scottish Government between 3 March 2020 - 01 June 2020 (76 briefings in total)

Wales: Daily Press Briefings by Welsh Government between 23 March 2020 - 01 June 2020 (56 briefings in total)

Northern Ireland: Daily Press Briefings by N. Ireland Assembly between 23 March 2020 - 01 June 2020 (56 briefings in total)

World Health Organisation: Press Briefings occuring usually every 2 days between 22 January 2020 - 01 June 2020 (63 briefings in total)

More countries will be added in due course, and we will be keeping this updated to cover the latest daily briefings available.

The corpus is compiled to allow for further automated political discourse analysis (classification).

First reported in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, now more than 846,200 confirmed cases of COVID-19 are spread across 187 countries worldwide. The US and several countries in Europe such as Italy, Spain, and Belgium have continued to see a decrease in daily cases. Russia, Brazil, and Latin American countries are seeing increasing trends. India has also seen an increase in the number of new cases reported despite strict distancing measures taken early on.
Special populations analysis covered in the report include the following:
COVID-19 in children may result in systemic multisystem syndrome with severe outcomes.
Childhood routine vaccination rates drop during pandemic.
COVID-19’s impact in pregnant women unclear, though most cases are asymptomatic.
The COVID-19 pandemic could cause an increase in the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Complications of opioid addiction will be challenging for the management of disease during the COVID-19 pandemic. Read More

As global communities responded to COVID-19, we heard from public health officials that the same type of aggregated, anonymized insights we use in products such as Google Maps would be helpful as they made critical decisions to combat COVID-19. These Community Mobility Reports aimed to provide insights into what changed in response to policies aimed at combating COVID-19. The reports charted movement trends over time by geography, across different categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential.

The entire oil and gas ecosystem is unsettled by the unprecedented outbreak of COVID-19. Daily activities of producers, equipment and service providers, EPC contractors, storage and transportation companies, fleet operators, traders, and marketers are getting delayed or cancelled. This is potentially creating gaps along the oil and gas supply chain, which might take a while to fix. Read More

Baseline demographics for the complete dataset and separate adult and paediatric cohorts.