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).

Briefing binder for the Minister of Health’s appearances at the Special Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic (COVI) – Week of April 28

The briefing materials below were initially prepared for the Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations for the Special Committee on the COVID-19 pandemic on May 12, 2020. These materials were subsequently updated for appearances by the Minister at additional Committees of the Whole and meetings of the Special Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic that were held between May 14 and June 17, 2020. Appearance dates: May 12, 14, 19, 21, 25, 27 (COVI Committee # 12, no updates) and 28. June 2, 3, 8, 9, 11 and 17.

The briefing materials prepared for the Minister of Northern Affairs for the Special Committee on the COVID-19 pandemic and Committees of the Whole related to the pandemic included Question Period notes that were published December 13, 2019, and May 26, 2020. These materials were subsequently updated for appearances by the Minister at Committees of the Whole and meetings of the Special Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic that were held between May 14 and June 18, 2020.

Briefing materials on the Indigenous Services or Crown-Indigenous Relations portfolios are included when the Minister of Northern Affairs intervened on behalf of the Minister of Indigenous Services or Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations.

Appearance dates: April 29, May 6, 14, 21 (no updates, COVI Committee 11), June 9, 18 (no updates, COVI Committee 25).

Pacific Statistical/Economic Briefing: COVID-19 Economic Impacts - Quarter 1, 2020. Noumea, New Caledonia: Pacific Community. 6 p.

Briefing Package for the President - PACP, Report 1, ArriveCAN

Briefing Package for the Standing Committee on Public Accounts on Report 10— Specific COVID-19 Benefits (other than CEWS) of the Office of the Auditor General of Canada

In a McKinsey briefing note on COVID-19, population antibody surveys suggest that official counts of coronavirus are underestimating the true number of cases by a factor of five or more (although in several cases the methodology has been called into question). This statistic shows the reported prevalence and the extrapolated prevalence from sample-based testing in select locations as of April 29, 2020.

Briefing Package for the hearing on Government’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic before the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates on 7 June 2021

Briefing Package for the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance on Report 9—COVID-19 Vaccines and Report 10—Specific COVID-19 Benefits of the Auditor General of Canada

Briefing binder for the Minister of Health’s appearances at the Special Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic (COVI) – Week of May 18, 2020

Quarterly data associated with Pacific statistical/economic briefing of COVID-19 economic impact.

Find more Pacific data on PDH.stat.

Briefing binder prepared for the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans for her appearance before the House of Commons Special Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic on May 1st, 2nd, and 18th, 2020.

Briefing Package for the Standing Committee on Public Accounts on Report 9—COVID-19 Vaccines of the Office of the Auditor General of Canada

This dataset contains the transcripts of the media briefings given by Dr. Deena Hinshaw the Chief medical Officer of Health of Alberta during the COVID-19 pandemic. The dataset also includes word frequency (raw frequency, relative frequency, TF-IDF) and sentiment analysis of the transcripts. The dataset spans the period of March 2020 to march 2022. Check the readme document for more information on the dataset. (2023-10-30)

Briefing Package for the hearing on Government’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic before the Standing Committee on Finance on 22 June 2020