covizr

covizr is a R package that provides easy access to Covid-19 data from Our World in Data, as well as functions to generate relevant Covid-19 charts and summaries easily. We aim to make covizr simple and easy to use. Our goal is to enable anyone with basic R programming knowledge to access and visualize Covid-19 data, and make their own informed decisions and conclusions.

There are existing R packages that allow users to download and generate Covid-19 charts. For example, covid19 is a package that presents worldwide COVID-19 data from several sources in a R environment.

We aim to provide simple visualization functions that allow users to answer questions regarding the Covid-19 pandemic as quickly as possible.

Features

This package contains four functions: get_data, plot_metric, plot_spec and plot_summary.

  • get_data: User can retrieve the COVID data from the source as a dataframe. Specific data can be retrieved by passing the date range and the list of countries

  • plot_metric: Create a line chart presenting COVID total new cases verses another metric within a time period

  • plot_spec: Create a line chart presenting specific country/countries COVID information within a time period

  • plot_summary: Create a horizontal bar chart summarising a specified variable and value within a time period

Installation 

# Uncomment the below line to install `devtools` if not installed. 
# install.packages("devtools") 
devtools::install_github("UBC-MDS/covizr")

After installation, we recommend to restart the R session before proceeding, as there may be dependencies packages being updated.

Usage and Examples

To use the package, import the package with following commands:

library(covizr)

To use the functions, see below examples:

Retrieve COVID-19 data with specified date range and default all locations 

df = get_data(date_from="2022-01-01", date_to="2022-01-21")

Plot summary graph (bar chart) 

plot_summary(df, var="location", val="new_cases", fun="sum", date_from="2022-01-01", date_to="2022-01-15", top_n=10)

Summary graph

Plot COVID-19 cases for specific countries (line chart) 

plot_spec(df, location=c("Canada", "Turkey"), val="new_cases", date_from="2022-01-01", date_to="2022-01-07")

New COVID-19 specific graph

Plot new COVID-19 cases versus another metric (line chart) 

plot_metric(df, loc_val = c("Canada"), metric='positive_rate', date_from="2022-01-15", date_to="2022-01-21")

New COVID-19 case metric graph

Contributors

  • Rohit Rawat
  • Rong Li
  • Thomas Siu
  • Ting Zhe Yan

Contributing

Interested in contributing? Check out the contributing guidelines. Please note that this project is released with a Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.

License

covizr was created by Rohit Rawat, Rong Li, Thomas Siu, Ting Zhe Yan. It is licensed under the terms of the MIT license.