Travel is broadening. You experience different cultures, see issues from different angles, and meet fun and unique people. I love living abroad, but I have to admit that I have less access to the news from home. Unfortunately, news outlets today spend more time on opinion than facts, and sometimes I just want the unvarnished truth. During the pandemic era, I am especially anxious to learn about the challenges faced by my family back home.

The good news is that a lot of open data on COVID-19 is available on the Internet via REST API calls. This data might be too dry for some, but if you want to get your own impressions of the COVID-19 crisis, without the sometimes intrusive "analysis" of newscasters and commentators, this free Internet data is a valuable resource. This article describes how to access and display freely available COVID-19 data using open source tools. And, if you've already had your fill of COVID-19 information, the techniques I'll describe in this article will also help you with other kinds of government and academic data available through REST APIs.

CovidAPI

The CovidAPI project [1] provides COVID data based on the well respected Johns Hopkins University dataset [2]. The original Johns Hopkins data is available in CSV form. Argentine software developer Rodrigo Pomba converted the data to JSON time series format. According to the documentation [3], the goal of the project is to make the data "queryable in a manner in which it could be easily consumed to build public dashboards."

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