COVID-2019 Dynamic plots

I have made some deep-dives into programming with R for the purpose of visualising the coronavirus world-wide using the Gapminder tools. The source code is available on GitHub. The graphs are configurable but looks something like the figure below. graph I wrote a brief article on LinkedIn about it, and you can test it out on this page.

Comparing countries

Inspired by graphs I saw published in Financial Times, I added some plotting features to the R script. I mainly use the ggplot2 and cowplot packages for this.

graph

The code

The main purpose of the R script is to restructure the excel file into a format that 'Gapminder tools' understand. This entails the following steps: 1) Moving country name to first column, and 2) Changing the date format to YYYYMMDD and move to second column. The ECDC data only reported the daily cases and deaths, but the total numbers are also relevant. So I added columns for aggregated values. A column indicating the number of days since the 100'th case was added. Finally, each country was assigned a world region.

Here I have highlighted the key 'R' code elements that I used to achieve this.

Getting the data from the ECDC website

GET(url, authenticate(":", ":", type="ntlm"), write_disk(tempfile <- tempfile(fileext = ".xlsx")))
res <- read.xlsx(tempfile, 1)

Make unique list of countries

countries <- unique(ecdcdata %>% select(countriesAndTerritories))

Loop through countries

for (row in 1:nrow(countries)) {
  cname = as.character(countries[row, "countriesAndTerritories"])
  countrydata <- subset(data, countriesAndTerritories == cname)
  result <- sumcountry(countrydata, regions, cname, MinCases)
    if (isFALSE(result) == FALSE) {
      tmpdf = rbind(tmpdf, result)
    }
  }

Adding up the cases and deaths

This is done in the function sumcases()
sumcountry <- function(scdata, regions, country, mincases) {
  for (row in 1:nrow(scdata)) {
      scdata[row, "dayssince100"] <- as.integer(date - d100)
      scdata[row, "date"] <- as.character(date, format="%Y%m%d")
      scdata[row, "days"] <- totdays
      scdata[row, "aggcases"] <- sumcases
      scdata[row, "aggdeaths"] <- sumdeaths
  } # end loop over dates
}

Writing the new file

row.names=FALSE is needed to get rid of R's index column.
gapm <- subset(df, select=c('countriesAndTerritories', 'date', 'dayssince100', 'aggcases', 'aggdeaths',
                             'cases', 'deaths', 'region')))
write.xlsx(gapm, "gapminder.xlsx", sheetName="countries", row.names=FALSE)