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COVID-19 in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of COVID-19 news from a global news index, January 2019 – July 2026, built with the Prism News API (historical and real-time news, https://radar-api.fliarbi.com/news). Every row is one news article about COVID-19, with its date, location, tone, priority rating, themes and the organisations it names, plus a link that returns the full article through the API.
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Key findings
In a global news index covering January 2019 to July 2026, April 2020 was the month in which COVID-19 took its largest share of the news, at 3,150.18 articles per 10,000, or 31.5% of all articles published that month.
Basis: 412,557 matched articles in April 2020 divided by all articles in the index that month; every month from January 2019 to July 2026 compared.
COVID-19 took 14.36% of all news in 2020 (1,436.12 articles per 10,000) and 38.05 per 10,000 in 2024, a 37.74-fold fall in share over four years.
Basis: Annual matched articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year, 2020–2024.
Of 4,670,267 news articles about COVID-19 published between January 2019 and July 2026, 49.91% appeared in the single year 2020.
Basis: De-duplicated article identifiers matched on the opening text; 2,330,831 of them dated 2020.
Between January 2023 and July 2026, 53.7% of COVID-19 news articles carrying a tone label were negative in tone, 1.6 times the 33.6% negative share across all news in the same index.
Basis: Top sentiment label of each article, grouped into negative, neutral and positive; 99.8% of sampled articles carry a label.
Between January 2023 and July 2026, the news index's machine-assigned priority rating placed 74.5% of COVID-19 articles at critical priority (7 or higher on a 1–9 scale), 1.75 times the 42.6% share for all news in the same index.
Basis: Top priority label per article; critical = priority of 7 or more.
Charts and maps
Coverage by country
Primary location of located articles, January 2023 – July 2026. Lift = the country's share of this topic's news ÷ its share of all located news (above 1 = over-covered).
| Country | Articles | Share | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 109,320 | 53.85% | 1.11 |
| India | 20,032 | 9.87% | 0.75 |
| China | 13,007 | 6.41% | 2.43 |
| United Kingdom | 12,318 | 6.07% | 1.04 |
| Australia | 4,889 | 2.41% | 1.12 |
| Canada | 4,128 | 2.03% | 0.95 |
| Brazil | 2,979 | 1.47% | 1.7 |
| Singapore | 2,621 | 1.29% | 1.45 |
| New Zealand | 2,540 | 1.25% | 1.93 |
| France | 2,164 | 1.07% | 0.54 |
| Japan | 1,895 | 0.93% | 0.88 |
| Germany | 1,646 | 0.81% | 0.69 |
| Italy | 1,641 | 0.81% | 0.84 |
| Spain | 1,235 | 0.61% | 0.62 |
| Ukraine | 1,194 | 0.59% | 1.1 |
Use the API
This dataset was built with the Prism News API, which serves historical and real-time news. Install the command-line client, log in with an API key, and query the topic yourself:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliarbi/prism-news-api/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
prism-news login
prism-news trends "covid" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. COVID-19 in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23445750