Full edition for scientific use. The COVID-19 pandemic confronted the world with a crisis that was massive in scale, rapid in pace, and global in scope. Governments all over the world were confronted with the challenging task of steering anxious publics through the crisis and they chose televised press conferences as their preferred means of communication. This dataset contains transcripts of 1211 press conferences with 522 speakers in 18 OECD countries and three U.S. states throughout the initial phase of COVID-19, beginning with the first public mention of COVID-19 in a press conference and ending with the first announcement of easing restrictions. In addition, the dataset includes contextual data on the countries and publicly available biographical data on the speakers.