  The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global pandemic has transformed
almost every facet of human society throughout the world. Against an emerging,
highly transmissible disease with no definitive treatment or vaccine,
governments worldwide have implemented non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) to
slow the spread of the virus. Examples of such interventions include community
actions (e.g. school closures, restrictions on mass gatherings), individual
actions (e.g. mask wearing, self-quarantine), and environmental actions (e.g.
public facility cleaning). We present the Worldwide Non-pharmaceutical
Interventions Tracker for COVID-19 (WNTRAC), a comprehensive dataset consisting
of over 6,000 NPIs implemented worldwide since the start of the pandemic.
WNTRAC covers NPIs implemented across 261 countries and territories, and
classifies NPI measures into a taxonomy of sixteen NPI types. NPI measures are
automatically extracted daily from Wikipedia articles using natural language
processing techniques and manually validated to ensure accuracy and veracity.
We hope that the dataset is valuable for policymakers, public health leaders,
and researchers in modeling and analysis efforts for controlling the spread of
COVID-19.
