OK. We are at home. Again. Given that large parts of Europe and the U.S. are currently experiencing a second large wave of Covid-19 cases and that most European jurisdictions have reacted with more or less rigorous lockdown regulations, one wonders about the effects of these regulations on social distancing compared to the one in March/April. This graphical primer on this topic is the outcome of a recent data visualization workshop that we run for the TRR 266.

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A recent update to the {tidycovid19} package brings data on testing, alternative case data, some regional data and proper data documentation. Using all this, you can use the package to explore the associations of (the lifting of) governmental measures, citizen behavior and the Covid-19 spread.

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As a package maintainer you might be observing an increasing number of questions raised by people that have recently migrated to R 4.0.0 and are now trying to get your package to work. While migrating to a new version is always tempting maybe you don’t feel like disrupting your development environment just now as you have even more fun things to do. Fear not! A quick docker container can help you to test your package and its functionality without touching your main environment. Let me show you how.

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Yesterday, I came across the Google “COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports“. In these reports, Google provides some statistics about changes in mobility patterns across geographic regions and time. The data seem to be very interesting to assess the extent of how much governmental interventions and social incentives have affected our day-to-day behavior around the pandemic. Unfortunately, the data comes in by-country PDFs. What is even worse, the daily data is only included as line graphs in these PDFs. Well, who does not like a challenge if it is for the benefits of open science?

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Assessing the impact of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions on the spread of Covid-19 requires data on Governmental measures. Luckily, the Assessment Capacities Project (ACAPS) and the Oxford Covid-19 Government Response Tracker both provide such data. In this blog post, I explore the new data provided by the Oxford initiative and compare it against the data provided by ACAPS that is already included in my {tidycovid19} package.

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Joachim Gassen

Curious researcher, passionate teacher and coding nerd.

Professor of accounting at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Berlin