Economist data journalist James Tozer via Twitter – “NEW, FREE DATA: We have just published the code and data behind our excess mortality tracker on Github. We believe this is the first public resource to provide this information, and we hope academics and journalists can use it for their research https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-excess-deaths-tracker. For several weeks @martgnz and myself have been cleaning, analysing and presenting this data on our tracking page @TheEconomist, which provides interactive charts and is free to read. Excess deaths are now being widely used to analyse the covid-19 pandemic, as the most comparable measure across countries. But as @MaxCRoser pointed out yesterday, none of this data has been turned into a public resource yet. Eagle-eyed readers might note that we have several countries in our Github repo that are not included yet on the tracking article page @TheEconomist. We are redesigning the page and will be launching it next week. I will be keeping this repository updated throughout the pandemic. If you have any suggestions, either for things to change or countries to add, please email me: [email protected].” [ht/ Sharon Machlis]