Thread by @joepgpalmer

1/10 covidregionaldata 0.9.0 is now on CRAN! covidregionaldata is an #rstats package providing subnational & national #covid19 data in an open and robust framework. epiforecasts.io/covidregionald…
@seabbs @sbfnk @kathsherratt @RMartinNielsen @cmmid_lshtm @lshtm @RHULBioSci @BBSRC

2/10 The rewrite I have been leading over the last two months, as part of my PhD PIPS placement at @cmmid_lshtm, rewrites the package using an OOP R6 based approach and lays the groundwork for future extensions.

3/10 Released in April 2020, covidregionaldata was designed to process data needed for @sbfnk groups reproduction number estimates with the twin goals of making our tooling available for others and making our entire workflow #opensource and easy to review epiforecasts.io/covid/posts/gl…

4/10 Apart from being extra work, we noticed how easy it was to introduce (often tricky to spot) bugs whilst cleaning and formatting subregional level data. This diverted our (and likely other researchers) attention away from performing critical research.

5/10 With many research teams working on COVID-19 we felt it important to have a package to check and standardise data, allowing researchers to focus on the important stuff rather than on handling data.

6/10 We also felt it was important to keep the data cleaning connected with the raw sources, easy to inspect at each step, and implemented using tools researchers are familiar with.

7/10 Since work started on covidregionaldata many other great projects have started to pre-process notification data for researchers. These include (but not limited to):

JHU: github.com/CSSEGISandData…

Google: github.com/GoogleCloudPla…

Covid19 Hub: covid19datahub.io

8/10 Currently covidregionaldata supports subnational data for 14 countries (including the UK, USA, Brazil, and India) and national level data curated by the WHO and ECDC, with John Hopkins University, Google, Covid19 hub, data coming soon.

github.com/epiforecasts/c…

9/10 We very much encourage #opensource contributors and for volunteers to maintain individual datasets. Please see our issues, wiki and discussions boards for more info.

Issues: github.com/epiforecasts/c…
Wiki: github.com/epiforecasts/c…
Discussions: github.com/epiforecasts/c…

10/10 The initial package and this rewrite has been a result of contributions from a large number of people. For this release we would like to highlight the great contributions from @RMartinNielsen and @kathsherratt. See the complete list of authors here: epiforecasts.io/covidregionald…