Two words in cell get separated with pandas melt

Hello all. New to this forum.

I have a script where I read Covid data in wide format and use melt to change to long. It worked fine awhile back but when I run it now, two words from a single cell got separated out and moved over to the right and subsequently moved the other cells over.

Previously:
Province_State Country_Region Date Confirmed
Hong Kong China 1/24/20 10

Recently:
Province_State Country_Region Date Confirmed
Hong Kong China 1/24/20 10

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

data = pd.read_csv(‘https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/master/csse_covid_19_data/csse_covid_19_time_series/time_series_covid19_confirmed_global.csv’)

#this line creates a dataframe with the variable df from the variable data and the source
df = pd.DataFrame(data)

this line drops any unnecessary columns

df = df.drop([‘Lat’,‘Long’], axis=1)

#these 3 lines replace the cruise line names and any other non country values as a ‘nan’ (i.e. N/A) and #then dropna removes any nan’s
df=df.replace(‘Diamond Princess’,np.nan).dropna(axis = 0, how = ‘any’)
df=df.replace(‘Grand Princess’,np.nan).dropna(axis = 0, how = ‘any’)
df=df.replace(‘Repatriated Travellers’,np.nan).dropna(axis = 0, how = ‘any’)

#this line renames a column(s)
df.rename(columns={‘Province/State’:‘Province_State’, ‘Country/Region’:‘Country_Region’}, inplace=True)

#this line removes the asterisk from the country name
df[‘Country_Region’] = df[‘Country_Region’].replace([‘Taiwan*’],‘Taiwan’)

#this line pivots the dates (as headers for each column) and values from wide to long format; id_vars #keeps the columns as they are, value_vars is the column that is the pivot point, var_name is the new #column for dates and #value_name is for the date values
df_melted = pd.melt(df, id_vars = [‘Province_State’, ‘Country_Region’], value_vars=df.columns[2:], var_name=‘Date’, value_name=‘Confirmed’)

#this line removes any rows with values of 0
df_melted = df_melted[df_melted[‘Confirmed’] != 0]

Tried typing in search words/phrases for my dilemma but couldn’t seem to find anything.
Much obliged for any help!