README.md

COVID benchmarking

This repository contains R code that I have used to benchmark a country against other countries.I have benchmarked Australia against a selection of OECD countries.

Setup

First let’s set up some global variables:

country_of_interest <- "AUS"
countries <- c(country_of_interest, "NZL", "USA", "GBR", "CAN", "DEU", "FRA", 
  "AUT", "BEL", "SGP", "DNK", "ISR", "ITA", "JPN", "KOR", "NLD", "FIN", "NOR", 
  "SWE", "ESP", "CHE")
countries <- countries[order(countries)]
smaller_set_of_countries <- c(country_of_interest, "CAN", "NZL", "SGP")
start_date <- as.Date("2021-09-01")

Data sourcing

All data is sourced from Our World in Data.

url <- "https://covid.ourworldindata.org/data/owid-covid-data.csv"
owid <- read_csv(url, show_col_types = FALSE)

Data post-processing

Post-processing of this data set includes:

0. Translating the “wide” format OWID data set into a “long” format.
1. Filtering for countries that are of interest (in my case, a selection of OECD countries).
2. Filling missing values with the last available value.

owid_long_tbl <-
  owid |>
  filter(
    iso_code %in% countries,
    date >= start_date
  ) |>
  select(
    iso_code,
    location,
    date,
    stringency_index,
    people_fully_vaccinated_per_hundred,
    total_boosters_per_hundred,
    new_tests_smoothed_per_thousand,
    new_cases_smoothed_per_million,
    # "Tests conducted per new confirmed case of COVID-19, given as a rolling
    #  7-day average (this is the inverse of positive_rate)"
    tests_per_case,
    hosp_patients_per_million, # stock, not flow.
    icu_patients_per_million,  # stock, not flow.
    new_deaths_smoothed_per_million
  ) |>
  fill(
    stringency_index,
    people_fully_vaccinated_per_hundred,
    total_boosters_per_hundred,
    new_tests_smoothed_per_thousand,
    new_cases_smoothed_per_million,
    tests_per_case,
    hosp_patients_per_million,
    icu_patients_per_million,
    new_deaths_smoothed_per_million
  ) |> 
  pivot_longer(
    cols = !c("iso_code", "location", "date"),
    names_to = "indicator",
    values_to = "value"
  ) |>
  mutate(
    indicator = as_factor(indicator)
  )

The following compares the country of interest to a selection of the other countries since the start_date defined above.

owid_long_tbl |> 
  filter(iso_code %in% smaller_set_of_countries) |>
  ggplot(aes(x = date, y = value, colour = iso_code)) +
  geom_point(size = 0.75) +
  scale_colour_brewer(type = "qual", palette = "Set1") +
  facet_wrap(vars(indicator), scales = "free_y") +
  theme_light() +
  theme(legend.position = "bottom") +
  labs(
    title = "COVID stats", 
    subtitle = "Time series of COVID stats for select countries",
    x = "Date",
    y = "Value",
    colour = "Country ISO code",
    caption = paste("Data sourced from Our World in Data.", 
      "Prepared by @imanuelcostigan.")
  )

## Warning: Removed 36 rows containing missing values (geom_point).

And finally, we compare the country of interest to the other countries. We do this on the most recent date for which we have data for all countries of interest.

benchmark_date <- owid_long_tbl |> 
  group_by(iso_code) |> 
  summarise(last_date = max(date, na.rm = TRUE)) |> 
  pull(last_date) |> 
  min()
last_benchmark_dates <- benchmark_date - c(14, 7)
owid_snaps <-
  owid_long_tbl |>
  filter(date %in% c(last_benchmark_dates, benchmark_date)) |> 
  mutate(date = as.character(date))
owid_country_of_interest <- 
  owid_snaps |>
  filter(iso_code == country_of_interest)
owid_snaps |>
  ggplot(aes(x = date, y = value)) + 
  geom_boxplot()  +
  geom_boxplot(data = owid_country_of_interest, colour = "red") +
  facet_wrap(vars(indicator), scales = "free") +
  theme_bw() +
  labs(
    title = "COVID benchmarking",
    subtitle = paste0("Comparing ", country_of_interest, " (red) to ",
      paste0(countries[countries != country_of_interest], collapse = ", ")),
    caption = paste("Data sourced from Our World in Data.", 
      "By @imanuelcostigan. Source:", 
      "https://github.com/imanuelcostigan/covidbenchmark")
  )