Daily United States COVID-19 data for select cities and counties, May 29, 2020 to October 21, 2020

This dataset by The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic captures the virus’s transmission in 65 cities and counties across the country. Many of these metropolitan areas only report the current day’s totals and remove older data from their public health dashboards so that no historical archive is available. As a result, it’s often impossible to see the impact of the virus on a particular geography over time. Our dataset captures this historical information. It is the only available metropolitan dataset that includes race and ethnicity, which allows us to improve our understanding of how COVID-19 disproportionately affects communities of color.

We have completed our data collection on this project and want to share what we’ve learned from viewing COVID-19 at the local level. Five months in, we’ve seen that local data tells a vastly different story than state-level data. Not only do trends emerge in city and county data before appearing at the state level, but state-level data also o...