COVID-19, Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT)

The Oxford Covid-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) collected information on which pandemic response measures were enacted by governments, and when. During the pandemic this helped decision-makers and citizens understand governmental responses in a consistent way, aiding efforts to fight the pandemic. Now that covid-19 is no longer designated a public health emergency of international concern, the data can be used for research purposes and to prepare for future pandemics.

The OxCGRT systematically collected information on several different common policy responses governments took over 2020, 2021, and 2022, recorded these policies on a scale to reflect the extent of government action, and aggregates these scores into a suite of policy indices. We also collected differentiated policies data where different policies apply to people who were vaccinated and non-vaccinated.

The OxCGRT reports publicly available information on 24 policy indicators and a miscellaneous notes field of government response organised into four groups:

• C: containment and closure policies
• E: economic policies
• H: health system policies
• V: vaccination policies

To help make sense of the data, we have produced four indices that aggregate the data into a single number. For more details about how the indices are comprised, see the section 'Calculation of policy indices' in our documentation. Each of these indices reports a number between 0 to 100 that reflects the level of the government's response along certain dimensions:

• overall government response index (all indicators)
• containment and health index (all C and H indicators)
• stringency index (all C indicators, plus H1 which records public information campaigns)
• economic support index (all E indicators)

These indices are a measure of how many of the relevant policy types a government has acted upon, and to what degree. The index cannot say whether a government's policy has been implemented effectively.

Because of the complexity of the dataset, it is published across 27 CSV files. Our technical documentation (https://github.com/OxCGRT/covid-policy-dataset/blob/main/documentation_and_codebook.md) contains all the information users need to navigate and use the data.