Microproduct data guidebeginner

NCHS Provisional Mortality

Weekly provisional U.S. death counts by jurisdiction for building mortality monitors and excess-death research prototypes.

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At a glance

Difficulty
Beginner — comfortable for a first prototype
Size
Small · ≤0.1 GB
Formats
JSON, CSV
Access
API or Download
API key
Not required
Provider
National Center for Health Statistics
Updates
Weekly
Data terms
U.S. Public Domain with CDC attribution and use requirements

From source to product signal

Test a product idea in four steps

NCHS publishes weekly provisional death counts on data.cdc.gov. Start with one jurisdiction and all-cause deaths. Provisional counts are incomplete, lag varies by state, and they are not cause-specific research files from WONDER.

1

Check the setup

  • Python 3.10 or newer
  • A notebook environment such as Jupyter or Google Colab
  • An internet connection
2

Access the data

  1. 1.Open the Weekly Provisional Counts dataset page.
  2. 2.Query one jurisdiction through the Socrata JSON endpoint.
  3. 3.Keep week-ending date, jurisdiction, and all-cause deaths.
Open official source
3

Run the Python example

Install the packages, then run the notebook cell.

python -m pip install pandas requests

import pandas as pd
import requests

response = requests.get(
    "https://data.cdc.gov/resource/muzy-jte6.json",
    params={
        "$where": "jurisdiction_of_occurrence='California'",
        "$limit": 52,
        "$order": "week_ending_date DESC",
    },
    timeout=30,
)
response.raise_for_status()
deaths = pd.DataFrame(response.json())
deaths["retrieved_at_utc"] = pd.Timestamp.now(tz="UTC")
print(deaths.head())
4

Test a useful signal

Chart California weekly deaths

Test whether provisional counts can power a bounded mortality sparkline.

  1. 01Convert week-ending dates and all-cause counts to usable types.
  2. 02Plot the latest year of weekly deaths and note weeks that may still be incomplete.
  3. 03Explain that provisional NCHS counts lag and are not the final vital-statistics file.

Dataset details

National Center for Health Statistics is a government source. Last verified 2026-08-18. Temporal coverage: weekly provisional death counts with lagged completeness.

Theme

Health, Food & Safety

Domains

Public HealthDemographics

Data types

Time SeriesTabularVital Statistics

Tasks

Mortality MonitoringGeographic ComparisonTrend Analysis

Geography

United States

Formats

JSONCSV

Provider

National Center for Health Statistics

Data terms

U.S. Public Domain with CDC attribution and use requirements