The HTML source for the CISSS Outaouais site is accessed daily, the tables are scraped and processed into a tidy dataset, to produce the local (municipal) figures on this site. (I began regularly downloading the HTML source in fall 2020, and used the Wayback Machine to get earlier snapshots.) For the regional and RLS levels, various official datasets are downloaded daily from Quebec government and INSPQ sites; for the data from before I began these daily downloads, I accessed the corresponding files in the CCODWG Covid19 Canada Archive. Some historical hospitalization data come from the Ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux (MSSS). The latest opencovid.ca health region data are included for comparison. The source code for downloading and processing all data, and the resulting datasets, are available in the project GitHub repository. The menu above provides links to a variety of data sources on Covid-19.
Due to delays between events and their recording in the Quebec health information system, data for the most recent days are underestimated, particularly for confirmed cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Usually new data represents the previous day, but in the case of testing, new laboratory data always refer to the situation two days prior. Official Covid-19 data in Quebec use one of two types of date: the actual date of events or the reported date. Data with reported dates are the newly entered data released on daily government balance sheets. Data using actual dates are revised daily and retroactively in the health information system, and therefore, they present a more accurate picture of trends than those using the reported date. I use the latter as much as possible. While the local CISSS data and the data broken down by RLS presented here consist of the snapshots downloaded daily (which is the only way they are accessible) and these do not change once they are in the dataset, the other historical datasets shown on this site – from INSPQ and MSSS – are re-downloaded in their entirety every day. This means that the latter have the most complete and accurate data available to date, because these datasets are revised daily and corrected retroactively by their authors as new information becomes available. For these reasons, the most recent statistics (of the last few days) should be considered to be provisional.
Updates of this site usually occur daily, shortly after 12:15pm.