NOT MEDICAL ADVICE.  For information only. In an emergency, call your local emergency number immediately.
Public health · monitoring

Track the world's outbreaks
in one quiet dashboard.

VirusWatch is an open, real-time picture of global infectious disease activity — built on public WHO, CDC and ECDC data, refreshed every five minutes, and free for everyone.

Data sources
disease.sh / WHO
Refresh cadence
~5 min (COVID) · weekly (others)
Coverage
230 countries
hover a glow to see what's tracked
What the red pulses mean. Each glowing dot on the globe marks a region with one or more active outbreaks being tracked by the WHO or a national health authority. They are not predictions and do not represent imminent danger to that location — only that surveillance is ongoing. Hover any glow to see which diseases are tracked there and how many active outbreaks are on record — the globe will slow down so you can read the details, then resume rotating when your cursor moves away. Click to open the region's full briefing.
— · click any hotspot to open that country
Your health matters. So we keep watch.
Filter live counters by disease all 8 tracked diseases
Global cases
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Reported deaths
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Recovered
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Active cases
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currently active
updated —   ·   SOURCE: disease.sh · WHO situation reports
latest health news

From the people who track this.

Aggregated live from WHO, ECDC and PAHO RSS feeds. We don't write or summarize these stories — we just surface what the official agencies publish, refreshed every hour.

community notes

A space for your observations.

A simple notebook for tracking what you're seeing locally — something going around your school or workplace, a question to come back to, a public-health observation you want to remember. Posts are saved only on your device, so think of it like a private journal that lives with this site. Nobody else can read them.

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How this works: notes save to your browser's local storage — they don't go to a shared server, so other people can't see them. Until we add proper moderation we're keeping this private. Don't share sensitive medical details. For real concerns, see a doctor.
surveillance

Eight diseases under active monitoring.

Each card opens a full briefing: pathogen family, symptoms, transmission, prevention measures and active regions. Curated from WHO and CDC sources.

country burden

Where the cases are.

Top countries by cumulative reported cases and by reported deaths, across all currently tracked diseases. Full table on the Countries page.

By cases Top 8

By deaths Top 8

live atlas

Outbreaks, mapped.

Every marker is a current or recent outbreak. Marker color identifies the disease; marker size scales with case count. Hover for details, click to open the briefing.

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Scroll or drag to zoom · click marker for details

Want to see which outbreaks are closest to you? Tap a button below — your location stays in your browser, we don't send it anywhere.

or type one
disease library

Eight diseases, at a glance.

Click any card for the full briefing — symptoms, transmission, prevention, and current regional activity. All entries are curated from WHO and CDC factsheets.

methodology

How we choose the list.

The roster reflects diseases of current international concern as flagged by WHO and major public health agencies. We add or retire entries as the global picture shifts.

Inclusion criteria. A pathogen is added to VirusWatch when (a) there is an active outbreak being tracked by WHO or a regional CDC, (b) the disease has caused a Public Health Emergency of International Concern in the last decade, or (c) it represents a credible spillover threat actively monitored by national agencies.

Data freshness. COVID-19 totals refresh from disease.sh every five minutes. Other diseases are updated weekly from WHO situation reports and ECDC dashboards. The "Last updated" line on the homepage reflects the most recent COVID pull.

What's not on the list. Endemic diseases that don't currently have unusual activity (seasonal influenza, measles in vaccinated regions, common malaria patterns) aren't tracked here. For those, refer to your national health agency.

country burden

50+ countries, ranked and searchable.

Cumulative cases, deaths and population for the countries with the largest reported burden. Click a column header to sort. Filter by name to find a specific country.

quick lookup
Find a country, a disease, or both.
Picking a country opens its detail. Picking a disease alone opens that disease. Picking both opens the country with a highlight of which atlas outbreaks of that disease are recorded there.
# Country ↕ Cases ↓ Deaths ↕ Population ↕ WHO region ↕
aggregated · live

Global health news, from reliable sources only.

Headlines aggregated live from the WHO, ECDC and PAHO official RSS feeds. We never write or summarize — we just surface what they publish, sorted by date, deduplicated, and updated every hour.

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a century of pandemics

How outbreaks have reshaped the modern era.

A horizontal timeline of major infectious disease events since 1918, paired with a stacked view of the global death burden by decade across the dominant infectious diseases.

Estimated infectious disease deaths by decade

Millions of deaths attributed to major infectious diseases per decade, 1900s–2020s. Figures are approximate, drawn from historical demographic studies and WHO global health estimates.

SOURCE: WHO Global Health Estimates, Our World in Data, historical demography literature. Figures rounded for clarity.
emergency reference

If something goes wrong, here's who to call.

Verified emergency, police, fire, ambulance and poison-control numbers for 30+ countries. Save the relevant ones to your phone before you travel.

112 / 911 / 000
Universal emergency numbers Most of Europe uses 112. North America uses 911. Australia uses 000. New Zealand uses 111. Many mobile phones automatically connect to the local emergency number regardless of what you dial.
Country Continent General Police Fire Ambulance Poison Control
questions

The 30 things people ask us.

From "where does this data come from?" to "should I worry about bird flu?" — answered plainly. If your question isn't here, drop us a note on the Support page.

glossary

Every abbreviation, spelled out.

Public health writing leans heavily on shorthand. Here's the full form of every abbreviation you'll see on VirusWatch, grouped by what kind of thing it is.

about · donate

Free, ad-free, volunteer-built.

VirusWatch is maintained by a small independent team. We're not a healthcare provider and not affiliated with the WHO or any government agency.

Our mission

Public health data is some of the most consequential information on earth — and it's often hard to read. VirusWatch sits on top of the open data feeds you'd otherwise have to know where to find, and presents them in a form your aunt could read on her phone.

We don't sell ads. We don't sell your data. We don't have a paywall and we don't plan to. If we ever change that, this paragraph is the first place we'd update.

If you'd like to help

A small one-time donation keeps the hosting bill paid and the API quotas from getting throttled. No subscriptions, no upsell, no follow-up emails.

☕Buy us a coffee

Data sources

Live
disease.sh
Aggregated COVID-19 totals; mirrors JHU and Worldometers.
Briefings
WHO Disease Outbreak News
Situation reports for current outbreaks of international concern.
Briefings
US CDC factsheets
Pathogen biology, transmission and prevention guidance.
Maps
Natural Earth + world-atlas
Public-domain country geometries used in the Atlas page.
History
Our World in Data
Long-run mortality estimates for the decade chart.

Contact

For corrections, partnership requests, or to tell us where we got something wrong:
hello@viruswatch.example

your feedback

Tell us how to improve.

Found a bug, spotted a wrong number, or have an idea for what should be added? Drop a note below. Like the community notes on the home page, these save only to your device for now — once we add a moderated backend we'll move them to a shared list. We read every one when we open the site to add features.

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Same scope as community notes: feedback is stored in your browser only right now. Want it public? We can plug in a moderated public comment system (Giscus on GitHub) — give us a GitHub repo and we'll flip it on. Until then, this stays local.