This article was originally published on ProgrammableWeb.
Since February, ProgrammableWeb has been following the COVID-19 outbreak. During that time we have tried to keep our readers up to date on new resources being made available to developers who want to join the fight against the pandemic. For example, to support developer efforts, over 60 COVID-19 related APIs have been released along with all kinds of open-source code, data sets, and other tools. You can visit our COVID-19 Developer Resource Center to learn more.
One question that has arisen is which APIs have gained the most traction with developers. Every API in the ProgrammableWeb directory offers a tracking capability that notifies developers of any relevant updates (new versions, news, etc.) through a weekly personalized Watchlist. This functionality extends to all directory content including SDKs, Sample Code, Libraries, and Frameworks. Entire categories can also be tracked. If a reader is interested in the COVID-19 category, for example, they can track it to receive weekly notifications that will tell them about new content that has been added to the category — including directory assets and news stories — or updates to existing content.
On the ProgrammableWeb side of things, this tracking data gives us insight into the APIs that our readers are most interested in. With that in mind, we looked at which COVID-19 related APIs have the most followers. There are currently 68 APIs tagged with the COVID-19 category, these are the top five in terms of followers.
| API Name | Follower Count |
|---|---|
| NovelCOVID Track this API | 672 |
| Bing COVID-19 Data Track this API | 230 |
| COVID19INDIA Track this API | 152 |
| About Corona COVID-19 Untrack this API | 139 |
| Nubentos COVID-19 Tracking Track this API | 100 |
NovelCOVID – This RESTful API is an open-source collaboration hosted on GitHub. It is a free API that returns the current information about the COVID-19 outbreak. The API supports country-specific responses and allows queries on the following parameters: cases, today’s cases, deaths, today’s deaths, recovered, and critical. You can read our full coverage of this API.
Bing COVID-19 Data – The Bing COVID-19 Data API provides total confirmed cases, deaths, and recoveries by country. Data is sourced from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), World Health Organization (WHO), and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). The API is used as a source for a live map tracker from Microsoft Bing.
COVID19INDIA – This API is part of a volunteer-driven, crowdsourced database project for COVID-19 stats and patient tracing in India. The API returns daily confirmed cases, daily deceased cases, and daily recovered cases as time-series data. This information is also available cumulatively and per district.
About Corona COVID-19 – The About Corona COVID-19 API provides a RESTful interface that allows users to query data from The World Health Organization Situation Reports, the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CSSE), The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, The National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China, the ECDC, and the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC).
This API retrieves data by country including population, the number of confirmed cases, recovered cases, critical cases, deaths, recovered cases per death ratio, cases per million population, and more. The data is updated multiple times a day.
Nubentos COVID-19 Tracking – This API is from the self-proclaimed API marketplace for health, and it aims to provide valuable resources for tracking the COVID-19 outbreak. It provides developers access to data collected from global health organizations and local administrations including the WHO, the CDC, the CCDC, China’s National Health Commission, and the Chinese Website DXY. We covered this API in March.
For more on how to stay in the know during the COVID-19 pandemic, visit our COVID-19 resource hub.
