Partly because it grew out of a few code-throughs I was doing, but mostly as a classroom exercise, I pulled together a small data package for R called covdata, available at https://kjhealy.github.io/covdata/. It contains COVID-19 data from three sources:

• National level data from the European Centers for Disease Control.
• State-level data for the United States from the COVID Tracking Project.
• State-level and county-level data for the United States from the New York Times.

I’ll keep it up to date for at least the near future. If I get a chance I’ll write up a little walkthrough about the process of making a package like this. I find that making data packages for R is both intrinsically useful for data that will be used more than once, and also generally a very accessible and handy way to introduce students to the mechanics of R packaging. It’s much more common for regular users of R to have some data that would benefit from packaging than for them to have some set of functions that might usefully be packaged up for other people.