seandavi/sars2pack: COVID-19 data resources and analysis tools

On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization declared coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) a Public Health Emergency of International concern (PHEIC) and within six weeks had characterized the outbreak as a pandemic. Compared to the 2003-2004 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) PHEIC, the COVID-19 pandemic spreads more quickly and with a much higher death toll. However, the current pandemic is occurring in a more digital and interconnected world. Traditional public health organizations as well as data-mature organizations not traditionally involved directly in public health have rapidly developed digital disease surveillance infrastructuree that provides nearly realtime epidemic tracking data. These data resources have proven invaluable to understanding disease spread, to drive non-pharmacologic intervention (NPI), and, when combined with additional data resources, to project impacts to communities and healthcare systems around the world. Even as the urgency of the initial “hammer” of the COVID-19 pandemic begins to abate, the need for timely, robust, and granular datasets will inform business, policy, and even personal decisions for months or even years to come. This package provides documentation and access to highly-cited COVID-19 datasets and secondary data that allow real-time analysis, visualization, and interpretation of the state of COVID-19 at a community, national, or international level. By exposing these resources easily to the enormous community of data scientists using R, we hope to increase value and accelarate reporting, analysis, and decision-making.

install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("seandavi/sars2pack")