COVerAGE-DB is a global demographic database on COVID-19 funded, coordinated, and hosted at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock, Germany. The open-access database collects cumulative counts of confirmed COVID-19 cases, deaths, tests, and vaccines by age and sex.
“The main goal of COVerAGE-DB is to provide a centralized, standardized, age-harmonized, and fully reproducible database of COVID-19 data”, says Enrique Acosta, one of the three Directors of the database.
An international team of more than 70 researchers contributed to collecting data and metadata in COVerAGE-DB from governmental institutions. The team started their work right at the beginning of the pandemic in spring 2020. “We wanted to provide researchers around the world with high-quality data by age and sex with the maximum geographical coverage, and also include information on a regional level as quickly as possible”, says Enrique Acosta. Since the beginning of the pandemic it was clear that information by age was essential for understanding population-level differences in COVID-19 incidence, severity, and mortality.
As of today, the database includes more than 120 countries and 700 subnational areas. Although it is still in development, the database has more measures disaggregated by age and sex than other comparable demographic databases on COVID-19.
Since collection efforts began, the data was used in more than 30 studies. They were published in high impact journals such as Nature, PNAS and the International Journal of Epidemiology. In addition, UNICEF uses the database as the main source to analyze the impacts of COVID-19 on infant and child mortality and have built this useful interactive dashboard based on COVerAGE-DB.
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