About the Project
The COVID-19 Tracker Canada project is an independent volunteer-run initiative dedicated to aggregating, visualizing and sharing Canadian COVID-19 data. We aim to make up-to-date, granular Canadian COVID-19 data accessible to all via our dashboard and data API.
Entirely volunteer-run, the project was launched on March 7, 2020 with the goal of compiling fragmented data released by provinces and territories into a current database of cases across Canada. Shortly after, we shared this initial data with the Public Health Agency of Canada upon request, as they attempted to gauge the level of community transmission in the country.
As the pandemic evolved, we did too. In April 2020, we began expanding our tracked data to include fatalities, recoveries, testing and patients in hospital and ICU. In addition, we launched an API (application programming interface) to allow others to freely and easily access our data in real-time. We were the first tracking project in Canada and one of the first in the world to offer an API. In December 2020, we expanded our efforts to include all of our metrics not only provincially, but now at the health region level. In mid-December 2020, we launched our vaccine tracking initiative. This addition quickly became one of our most popular features, and the dataset was widely used by media both in Canada and internationally.
Since launch, millions of Canadians have used our website to stay up-to-date on the pandemic and vaccine rollout. Our data has been shared with hundreds of researchers, news organizations and curious members of the public, and has been requested by governments at every level, from municipal to federal. As well, our website was linked in the Government of Canada’s national daily epidemiological report for a number of days in Spring 2020. Our data has been used or referenced by all major news outlets in Canada and by many internationally including Reuters, CNN, the BBC, FT, and the NYT. Our vaccination and hospitalization data is used by Oxford's Our World In Data initiative, used by Google for their native visualizations of Canadian vaccinations and hospitalizations.
In late 2021, we began working directly with the Public Health Agency of Canada to provide vaccination, hospitalization and other COVID-19 related data at the health-region level through the University of Saskatchewan to support Canada's COVID-19 response.
The COVID-19 Tracker Canada project was founded by Noah Little, an undergraduate student at the University of Saskatchewan. The website and associated dataset continue to be maintained daily by Noah Little, along with a small team of volunteers who manually collect and verify data every day. Our API and data management system are developed by Andrew Thong. The website has been made possible with contributions by Noah Little, Andrew Thong, Alek Gulbenkian and many others. We maintain a presence on Twitter under the username @covid_canada, where we share relevant project updates and province-specific data throughout the day.
This website and the associated dataset will continue to be updated and maintained indefinitely.
If you have any questions about the website or associated dataset, please reach out.
Stay safe.