Interesting post by Hannah Ritchie at Our World In Data about why the site decided to stop using World Health Organization data on the COVID-19 pandemic in favor of data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
Unfortunately, in the publication of WHO data on 18th March – Situation Report 58 – they shifted the reporting cutoff time from 0900 CET to 0000 CET. This means that comparability is compromised because there is an overlap between the last two WHO data publications (Situation Reports 57 and 58).
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In published WHO Situation Reports were several inconsistencies in the number of total confirmed cases, and new confirmed cases that we noticed between the WHO Situation Reports and the WHO Dashboard, which also presents these statistics. These discrepancies are detailed below.
We have informed the WHO about these inconsistencies and are working closely with the World Health Organization (WHO) in an effort to resolve these issues. We continue to be in close contact with the WHO data team to ensure the latest statistics are presented accurately.
The inconsistencies are small and do not affect the overall perspective on the development of COVID-19 in a major way, but errors were too frequent and this was the second reason why we stopped to rely on the WHO data.