oxcgrt: An Interface to the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker API
Image credit: Ernest Guevarra
The Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) tracks and compares worldwide government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic rigorously and consistently. OxCGRT makes available systematic information in a consistent way, aiding those who require information have access to it efficiently. This package facilitates access to the OxCGRT data for R users via version 2 of its API. This package also includes functions to calculate the various OxCGRT indices in R. This package is aimed at R users who use or plan to use the OxCGRT data for their research or for other academic purposes or who develop or want to develop other metrics or indices that build on the OxCGRT approach.
What does oxcgrt do?
The oxcgrt package has two main sets of functions that:
Retrieve OxCGRT data (
get_*functions) via version 2 of its API; and,Calculate various OxCGRT indicators, sub-indices and indices (
calculate_*functions).
There are other R packages that provide access to data from the OxCGRT. The COVID19 package and the oxcovid19 package are just two examples of these. However, all these packages provide access to the OxCGRT data as data dumps and only for the time-series of the stringency index per country. To our knowledge, the oxcgrt package is the only R package currently that provides an interface to the available API for querying and retrieving data. Also, the oxcgrt package provides functions to calculate the OxCGRT sub-indices and indices based on their methodology. None of the other R packages that we have seen and reviewed have this functionality.
To learn more about the oxcgrt package - how to install in R, how to use the package, and how to contribute to its development and testing - visit the package website at https://como-ph.github.io/oxcgrt.