Medical Examiner Case Archive — Cook County

Effective April 1, 2022, the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office no longer takes jurisdiction over hospital, nursing home or hospice COVID-19 deaths unless there is another factor that falls within the Office’s jurisdiction. Data continues to be collected for COVID-19 deaths in Cook County on the Illinois Dept. of Public Health COVID-19 dashboard (https://dph.illinois.gov/covid19/data.html). This Actor returns it as one flat JSON row per record, with 38 declared fields — typed, named and documented in the dataset schema, so a spreadsheet or an agent can use it without guessing.

What you get

Field	Type	Meaning
chi_ward	number	Chicago Ward
location_state	string	location (state)
latino	boolean	Latino
gunrelated	string	Gun Related
location_city	string	location (city)
location_address	string	location (address)
cold_related	boolean	Cold Related
transportation_related	string	Transportation Related
latitude	number	Latitude
longitude	number	Longitude
gender	string	Gender
opioids	string	Opioid Related
manner	string	Manner of Death
heat_related	boolean	Heat Related
location_zip	string	location (zip)
primarycause	string	Primary Cause
transportation_related_type	string	Transportation Related Vehicle Type
longitude_2	number	longitude
race	string	Race
residence_city	string	Residence City

The output schema lists all 38 fields; the table above is the first twenty.

Every row also carries sourceRowId, sourceUpdatedAt and scrapedAt, so a pipeline can tell one record from another and know exactly when it was read.

{
  "chi_ward": 21,
  "location_state": "text",
  "latino": false,
  "gunrelated": "text",
  "location_city": "text",
  "location_address": "text",
  "cold_related": false,
  "transportation_related": "text"
}

Inputs

Field	What it does
Filter (SoQL)	Applied at the source, so a narrow question fetches a narrow page instead of downloading everything.
Order	Empty keeps the publisher's own order; set a column to sort, for example amount DESC.
Maximum rows	Hard cap. The source is paged 1,000 rows at a time.
Time budget	Stops cleanly and reports how far it got.
Pause between pages	Keeps the run inside the publisher's rate limits.

Limitations

• This is one dataset, from one publisher. It is the Medical Examiner Case Archive dataset as Cook County Medical Examiner publishes it — not a national or cross-city equivalent, and not a merge with other sources.
• The publisher can change it. Columns are added, renamed and retired upstream; the field list here is the schema the Actor was generated from. A renamed column arrives as a new field only after the Actor is updated.
• Fields are typed from live records. A column that was empty in the sample is declared as text; a value that does not fit the declared type comes back null rather than being coerced into a wrong number.
• Records are what the publisher publishes. No geocoding, no de-duplication across datasets, no enrichment.
• Freshness is the publisher's. The data was last changed upstream on 2026-10-25. Where the publisher supplies a row timestamp it appears as sourceUpdatedAt; scrapedAt records when this Actor read the row.

Why this is different

• Medical Examiner Case Archive — Cook County declares all 38 of its output fields in the dataset schema, each with a type, a description and an example.
• The Actor reads the Medical Examiner Case Archive dataset directly from Cook County Open Data; no key, login or account is needed.
• Filters run at the source with SoQL, so a narrow request returns a narrow page rather than a full download.
• Every row is flat JSON: nested location objects become latitude and longitude, and no field holds a nested object.
• The row id is stable, so the same request de-duplicates instead of returning the same record twice.

FAQ

Do I need an API key? No. Cook County Open Data publishes this dataset openly.

How fresh is it? The Actor reads the dataset live. scrapedAt records when each row was read, and sourceUpdatedAt carries the publisher's own row timestamp where it supplies one.

Can I filter by date or status? Yes — use the Filter field with SoQL, for example status = 'Active'.

What happens if my filter is wrong? The run stops with the portal's own message and the hint to check SoQL, rather than returning an empty dataset that looks like "no data".

Is this the whole dataset? Up to your row cap, paged 1,000 at a time. Raise the cap to read more.

What is sourceRowId? The publisher's own row id when it supplies one, otherwise a stable hash of the row. Either way it is what makes de-duplication and joins possible.

Pricing

Pay per result: $0.0005 per row. Each stored dataset row is billed, including any diagnostic row returned instead of results.

An Actor-start event is also charged at $0.0001 per GB of allocated memory (minimum one event), even if no rows are returned. At 1 GB or less, 1,000 result rows cost $0.5001 before any applicable Store discount.

Data source

Cook County Open Data — Medical Examiner Case Archive, published by Cook County Medical Examiner. Public data under the portal's open-data terms.