diff --git a/web_programming/covid_stats_via_xpath.py b/web_programming/covid_stats_via_xpath.py
index 9c016ba414ea..88a248610441 100644
--- a/web_programming/covid_stats_via_xpath.py
+++ b/web_programming/covid_stats_via_xpath.py
@@ -1,7 +1,8 @@
 """
-This is to show simple COVID19 info fetching from worldometers archive site using lxml
-* The main motivation to use lxml in place of bs4 is that it is faster and therefore
-more convenient to use in Python web projects (e.g. Django or Flask-based)
+This script demonstrates fetching simple COVID-19 statistics from the
+Worldometers archive site using lxml. lxml is chosen over BeautifulSoup
+for its speed and convenience in Python web projects (such as Django or
+Flask).
 """
 
 # /// script
@@ -25,15 +26,34 @@ class CovidData(NamedTuple):
 
 
 def covid_stats(
-    url: str = "https://web.archive.org/web/20250825095350/https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/",
+    url: str = (
+        "https://web.archive.org/web/20250825095350/"
+        "https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/"
+    ),
 ) -> CovidData:
     xpath_str = '//div[@class = "maincounter-number"]/span/text()'
-    return CovidData(
-        *html.fromstring(httpx.get(url, timeout=10).content).xpath(xpath_str)
+    try:
+        response = httpx.get(url, timeout=10).raise_for_status()
+    except httpx.TimeoutException:
+        print(
+            "Request timed out. Please check your network connection "
+            "or try again later."
+        )
+        return CovidData("N/A", "N/A", "N/A")
+    except httpx.HTTPStatusError as e:
+        print(f"HTTP error occurred: {e}")
+        return CovidData("N/A", "N/A", "N/A")
+    data = html.fromstring(response.content).xpath(xpath_str)
+    if len(data) != 3:
+        print("Unexpected data format. The page structure may have changed.")
+        data = "N/A", "N/A", "N/A"
+    return CovidData(*data)
+
+
+if __name__ == "__main__":
+    fmt = (
+        "Total COVID-19 cases in the world: {}\n"
+        "Total deaths due to COVID-19 in the world: {}\n"
+        "Total COVID-19 patients recovered in the world: {}"
     )
-
-
-fmt = """Total COVID-19 cases in the world: {}
-Total deaths due to COVID-19 in the world: {}
-Total COVID-19 patients recovered in the world: {}"""
-print(fmt.format(*covid_stats()))
+    print(fmt.format(*covid_stats()))