Retrieving and plotting COVID-19 data

Published

October 16, 2022

Background

The COVID19 package allows to conveniently retrieve statistical data about the COVID-19 pandemy. Here, the data for Germany are retrieved and two exploratory plots are created.

Loading libraries

library('ggplot2')
library('COVID19')

Retrieving the data

deu <- covid19('Germany', level = 1)

We have invested a lot of time and effort in creating COVID-19 Data
Hub, please cite the following when using it:

  Guidotti, E., Ardia, D., (2020), "COVID-19 Data Hub", Journal of Open
  Source Software 5(51):2376, doi: 10.21105/joss.02376

The implementation details and the latest version of the data are
described in:

  Guidotti, E., (2022), "A worldwide epidemiological database for
  COVID-19 at fine-grained spatial resolution", Sci Data 9(1):112, doi:
  10.1038/s41597-022-01245-1
To print citations in BibTeX format use:
 > print(citation('COVID19'), bibtex=TRUE)

To hide this message use 'verbose = FALSE'.

Plotting total number of confirmed cases

ggplot(data = deu, aes(date, confirmed)) + geom_point() + 
  geom_smooth()  + scale_y_log10()

`geom_smooth()` using method = 'gam' and formula = 'y ~ s(x, bs = "cs")'

Warning: Removed 12 rows containing non-finite values (`stat_smooth()`).

Warning: Removed 12 rows containing missing values (`geom_point()`).

Plotting new cases

dat <- data.frame(date = deu$date[-1], new_cases = diff(deu$confirmed))
ggplot(data = dat, aes(date, new_cases)) + geom_point() + 
  geom_smooth()  + scale_y_log10()

`geom_smooth()` using method = 'gam' and formula = 'y ~ s(x, bs = "cs")'

Warning: Removed 19 rows containing non-finite values (`stat_smooth()`).

Warning: Removed 19 rows containing missing values (`geom_point()`).

Conclusion

This package allows convenient retrieval of a lot of data about the COVID-19 pandemy.