The Epidata API

Delphi’s Epidata API provides real-time access to epidemiological surveillance data. It is built and maintained by the Carnegie Mellon University Delphi research group. The Epidata API includes:

  • The main endpoint (COVIDcast), providing daily updates about current COVID-19 and influenza activity across the United States.
  • A variety of other endpoints, providing primarily historical data about various diseases including COVID-19, influenza, dengue fever, and norovirus in several countries.

A full-featured R client is available for quick access to all data. While we continue developing a full-featured Python client, the legacy Python client remains available. The main endpoint can also be accessed with a dedicated COVIDcast client.

Anyone may access the Epidata API anonymously without providing any personal data. Anonymous API access is currently rate-limited and restricted to public datasets with a maximum of two of the requested parameters having multiple selections (signals, dates, versions, regions, etc).

To request access with no rate limit and unlimited multiple selections, you can request a registered API key. For policy and usage details, consult the Epidata API keys documentation.

If you regularly or frequently use our system, please consider using an API key even if your usage falls within the anonymous usage limits. API key usage helps us understand who and how others are using our Delphi Epidata API, which may in turn inform our future research, data partnerships, and funding.

For more information about how we use the data you provide us through your registration and API request activity, see our Privacy Statement. At any time, you may submit a Deletion Request to have us deactivate your key and destroy all information associating that key with your identity.

The Delphi group is extremely grateful to Pedrito Maynard-Zhang for all his help with the Epidata API documentation.

Developers interested in modifying or extending this project are directed to the Epidata API Development Guide.


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