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 ** 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).

Context

On January 30, 2020, the International Health Regulations Emergency Committee of the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC). On January 31, 2020, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex M. Azar II declared a public health emergency (PHE) for the United States to aid the nation’s healthcare community in responding to COVID-19. On March 11, 2020 WHO publicly characterized COVID-19 as a pandemic.

Content

The data files present the total confirmed cases, total deaths and daily new cases and deaths by country. This data is sourced from the World Health Organization (WHO) Situation Reports (which you find here). The WHO Situation Reports are published daily [reporting data as of 10am (CET; Geneva time)]. The main section of the Situations Reports are long tables of the latest number of confirmed cases and confirmed deaths by country.

This dataset has five files : - total_cases.csv : Total confirmed cases - total_deaths.csv : Total deaths - new_cases.csv : New confirmed cases - new_deathes.csv : New deaths - full_data.csv : put it all files together

Acknowledgements

This dataset is sourced from WHO and confirmed by OurworldInData Special Thank to Hannah Ritchie that did a great reports explaining those datasets.

Inspiration

Insights on - Confirmed cases is what we do know - Confirmed COVID-19 cases by country - How we can make preventive measures - Growth of cases: How long did it take for the number of confirmed cases to double? - Understanding exponential growth - Try to predict the spread of COVID-19 ahead of time .

The briefing materials below were initially prepared for the Minister of Indigenous Services for Committee of the Whole on April 20, 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 April 29 and June 18, 2020. Briefing materials on the Northern portfolio are included when the Minister of Indigenous Services intervened on behalf of the Minister of Northern Affairs. Appearance dates: April 20, 28 (COVI Committee #1, no updates) and 29. May 5 (COVI Committee #3, no updates), 6, 12, 14, 20, 25 (Committee of the Whole, no updates). June 3, 11, 16 and 17.

Important Note:

The Government has stopped providing the data on total ICU and Ventilators after the 6th of May.

About

Nepal's total ICU and ventilator capacity in the COVID crisis.
Data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f7SctpDyMjll2AAMkPXlvkJL2MIrSGIJvD33hitEAZ0/edit?usp=sharing

Content

Columns: Date, Province, ICU Patients, ICU Total, ICU Occupancy, Ventilators Patients, Ventilators Total, Ventilators Occupancy

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the Ministry of Health and Populations' daily COVID briefing.

Inspiration

We can analyze our healthcare capacity and predict the potential health crisis beforehand.

Context

Different states in United States have different lockdown policy. I found this nice summary of the state action from https://www.ncsl.org that might be useful to those who like to investigate how different lockdown policies can help in flattening the curve. I cleaned up the dataset (like fill the null values, etc) without alternating any information and thus all the 'No' in the state can also be interpreted as NaN.

Content

Specifically, this dataset summarizes if each state (and US territories) perform the following actions (column of the dataset), as of April 10, 2020: 1. Emergency Declaration 2. Major Disaster Declaration 3. National Guard State Activation 4. State Employee Travel Restrictions 5. Statewide Limits on Gatherings and Stay at Home Orders 6. Statewide School Closures
7. Statewide Closure of Non-Essential Businesses
8. Statewide Closure of Some or All Non-Essential Businesses
9. Essential Business Designations Issued
10. Statewide Curfew
11. 1135 Waiver Status
12. Extension of Individual Income Tax Deadlines
13. Primary Election
14. Domestic Travel Limitations 15. Statewide Mask Policy
16. Ventilator Sharing

Acknowledgements

Again, this dataset was found from National Conference of State Legislatures website.

P.S.: Hope that this dataset is useful/helpful in understanding the impact of different lockdown policy.

Briefing Package for the hearing on Government’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic before the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates – 26 April 2021

Briefing packages - Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Disability Inclusion FEWO Appearance on Government’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic and the impacts on women July 8, 2020

Briefing binder for the deputy head of the Minister of Health’s appearances at the Special Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic (COVI) – Week of January 17 2022

During crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, it was necessary for political leaders to influence citizens to comply with public health measures and restrictions. These health measures (e.g., physical distancing, staying at home) had substantial negative effects on individuals lives and thus were sometimes met with defensive, non-cooperative responses. To influence citizens’ compliance with public health guidance and nationally imposed restrictions, political leaders needed to effectively motivate them through their public communications. We argue that whilst negative emotions may have discouraged citizens from deviating from public health restrictions, other factors such as citizens’ trust in political leaders played a role as well. We investigated whether the perception of the interpersonal emotion regulation (IER) strategies used by government leaders in ministerial briefings impacted citizens’ compliance intentions via either negative affect or perceived trustworthiness. Across three studies based in Western Europe (Studies 1 & 2 survey, Study 3 experimental), we consistently found that a leader’s affect-improving IER strategies increased compliance intentions via perceived trustworthiness but not via negative affect. Affect-worsening IER strategies demonstrated either no effect or an indirect worsening effect on the compliance intentions of citizens. Our findings highlight the importance of IER strategies in ministerial briefings and perceived trustworthiness of political leaders in motivating citizens to comply with public health restrictions during a pandemic.

Briefing Package for the hearing on Government’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic before the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates on 29 May 2020

Briefing package - Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Disability Inclusion: OGGO Appearance on Government’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, May 11, 2020

Supplementary data for the paper "Quality Assurance of a German COVID-19 Question Answering Systems using Component-based Microbenchmarking" at the 15th ACM International WSDM Conference (WSDM 2022).Abstract: Question Answering (QA) has become an often used method to retrieve data as part of chatbots and other natural-language user interfaces. In particular, QA systems of official institutions have high expectations regarding the answers computed by the system, as the provided information might be critical. In this demonstration, we use the official COVID-19 QA system that was developed together with the German Federal government to provide German citizens access to data regarding incident values, number of deaths, etc. To ensure high quality, a component-based approach was used that enables exchanging data between QA components using RDF and validating the functionality of the QA system using SPARQL. Here, we will demonstrate how our solution enables developers of QA systems to use a descriptive approach to validate the quality of their implementation before the system's deployment and also within a live environment.

Briefing package - Minister of Families, Children and Social Development OGGO Appearance on Government’s Response to the COVID-19 pandemic June 9, 2020

Briefing package - Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Disability Inclusion: NFFN Appearance on Government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, June 22, 2020

Briefing package - Appearance of the PHAC President at SOCI on COVID-19 on June 26 2020

Briefing binder created for the Minister of National Defence on the occasion of his appearance before the Special Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic on May 5. Includes Canadian Armed Forces Support to the Whole-of-Government, Response to COVID-19, Canadian Armed Forces assistance to Long Term Care Facilities, HMCS Fredericton Helicopter Accident, Parliamentary Budget Officer costing of Class C employment for Op Laser, Countering Misinformation on COVID-19