Now that the Covid-19 vaccination program is under way, data fans might be interested in obtaining the stats of how the UK is doing in terms of vaccinations administered so far.
The NHS is publishing a variety of these reports and, even better, the underlying data here.
The most comprehensive data there is likely the “Weekly data” section. The latest report there at the time of writing is an Excel file with the following contents (taken directly from the contents page of the latest file).
- Vaccinations by Region and Age
- Vaccinations by Integrated Care System (ICS)/Sustainability and Transformation Partnership (STP) and Age
- Vaccinations by Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and Age
- Vaccinations by Ethnicity
- Vaccinations by Ethnicity and Region
- Vaccinations by Ethnicity and Integrated Care System (ICS)/ Sustainability and Transformation Partnership (STP)
- Vaccinations of Residents in Older Adult Care Homes
- Vaccinations of Trust Health Care Workers
- Vaccinations of the Clinically Extremely Vulnerable Cohort (CEV)
- Population estimates
Most of the data is cumulative counts of vaccinations administered to date, separated into first and second doses, as the Covid-19 vaccination program requires two doses per person to be administered. More basic daily data is also available if up-to-dateness is of importance.
The data is nicely formatted, labelled, totalled and looks pretty – delightful if you want the data as presented, less so – but probably not too much trouble – if you’re looking to integrate the raw values into something of your own making.
Another datasource option in theory would be on the Government’s general coronavirus data site. A interactive time series chart of vaccines administered is here. And in theory you can get a data download of all sorts of related metrics here by customising your request as to the granularity of geography you want and the metrics you care about.
In theory this generates a web link that will let you repeat your request in the future as well as offer a direct download. In practice, for me, this worked well for some configurations of the report, and less so for others. For example a cumulative number of people getting their first dose by vaccination date worked well on a national level, but gave a “failed – no file” error when requested at a regional level.
Nonetheless, some kudos is due to the authorities at least trying to make this data available. It has improved over time from a basic count dichotomised by location and age to incorporate a few more details since the Royal Statistical Society rightly complained that the data wasn’t detailed enough to answer many of the important questions. There’s still some way to go before it meets the demands of the RSS, but it looks like some progress has been made. The BBC also recently published an article on things we don’t yet know about the vaccine rollout which has further suggestions for important datapoints that should be shared
Dabbling with Data 