Main updates in version 0.2.0:

• Data structure changes – updating changes in the raw data, such as adding new variables that related to the number of tests performed on both region and national level. More details available on the package changelog
• Geospatial columns – added the region_spatial and province_spatial columns for the italy_region and italy_province datasets, respectively. Those columns have the corresponding naming convention of Italy regions and province as in the output of the ne_states function from the rnaturalearth package. See example below
• Cron job – the data is now automatically refreshed on a daily basis with the use of Github Actions to run cron job

Keep the data updated

While the covid19italy CRAN version is updated every month or two, the Github (Dev) version is updated on a daily bases. The update_data function enables to overcome this gap and keep the installed version with the most recent data available on the Github version:

library(covid19italy)

update_data()

Note: must restart the R session to have the updates available

Plotting cases with a choropleth map

As mentioned above, one of the new features in v0.2.0 is the geospatial columns on the italy_region and italy_province. Those columns are using the naming conventions as used by the rnaturalearth package with the ne_states function. Therefore, it allows a simple and quick merge of the data with the geometric data of the regions and provinces of Italy. The following example demonstrates the use-case of this feature along with the rnaturalearth and mapview packages to create a choropleth map of the total confirmed cases in Italy by province. We will start with pulling the geometric data of Italy with the ne_states function and merge it with the italy_province dataset:

library(covid19italy)
library(rnaturalearth)
library(mapview)
library(dplyr)

italy_map <- ne_states(country = "Italy", returnclass = "sf")  %>% 
  select(province = name, region, geometry)  %>%
  left_join(italy_province %>% 
              filter(date == max(date)), # subseting for the most recent day
            by = c("province" = "province_spatial"))

Next, we will use the mapview package to plot the covid19 confirmed cases by Italy provinces:

italy_map %>%
  mapview(zcol = "total_cases")