Coronavirus (COVID-19) in the UK - API Service

Software Development Kit (SDK) for R

This is an R SDK for the COVID-19 API, as published by Public Health England on Coronavirus (COVID-19) in the UK. The source code of this library is housed on GitHub.

The API supplies the latest data for the COVID-19 outbreak in the United Kingdom.

The endpoint for the data provided using this SDK is:

https://api.coronavirus.data.gov.uk/v1/data

The SDK is also available for Python and JavaScript.

Installation

You can install the released version of ukcovid19 from CRAN with:

install.packages("ukcovid19")

or install from GitHub as follows:

remotes::install_github("publichealthengland/coronavirus-dashboard-api-R-sdk")

Pagination

Using this SDK will bypass the pagination process. You will always download the entire dataset unless the latest_by argument is defined.

To use the library, run:

library(ukcovid19)

or simply prepend the function names with ukcovid19; for instance:

ukcovid19::get_options()

Examples

We would like to extract the number of new cases, cumulative cases, new deaths and cumulative deaths for England using the API.

We start off by constructing the value of the filters parameter:

query_filters <- c(
    'areaType=nation',
    'areaName=England'
)

Next step is to construct the value of the structure parameter. To do so, we need to find out the name of the metric in which we are interested. You can find this information in the Developer's Guide on the Coronavirus Dashboard website.

In the case of this example, the metrics are as follows:

• newCasesByPublishDate: New cases (by publish date)
• cumCasesByPublishDate: Cumulative cases (by publish date)
• newDeathsByDeathDate: New deaths (by death date)
• cumDeathsByDeathDate: Cumulative deaths (by death date)

In its simplest form, we construct the structure as follows:

cases_and_deaths = list(
    date = "date",
    areaName = "areaName",
    areaCode = "areaCode",
    newCasesByPublishDate = "newCasesByPublishDate",
    cumCasesByPublishDate = "cumCasesByPublishDate",
    newDeaths28DaysByPublishDate = "newDeaths28DaysByPublishDate",
    cumDeaths28DaysByPublishDate = "cumDeaths28DaysByPublishDate"
)

Now, we can use filters and structure to get the data from the API:

data <- get_data(
    filters = query_filters, 
    structure = cases_and_deaths
)

# Showing the head:
print(head(data))

        date areaName  areaCode newCasesByPublishDate cumCasesByPublishDate newDeaths28DaysByPublishDate cumDeaths28DaysByPublishDate
1 2020-08-19  England E92000001                   707                277516                           15                        36757
2 2020-08-18  England E92000001                   975                276809                           11                        36742
3 2020-08-17  England E92000001                   634                275834                            3                        36731
4 2020-08-16  England E92000001                   952                275200                            3                        36728
5 2020-08-15  England E92000001                   934                274248                            2                        36725
6 2020-08-14  England E92000001                  1284                273314                           10                        36723

To see the timestamp for the last update, run:

timestamp <- last_update(
    filters = query_filters, 
    structure = cases_and_deaths
)

print(timestamp)

[1] "2020-08-02 14:50:59 GMT"

To get the latest data by a specific metric, use the latest_by argument as follows:

all_nations = c(
    "areaType=nation"
)

data <- get_data(
    filters = all_nations, 
    structure = cases_and_deaths,
    latest_by = "newCasesByPublishDate"
)

print(data)

        date areaName  areaCode newCasesByPublishDate cumCasesByPublishDate  newDeathsByDeathDate cumDeathsByDeathDate
1 2020-08-02  England E92000001                   676                262746                    NA                   NA
2 2020-08-02 Scotland S92000003                    31                 18676                    NA                   NA
3 2020-08-02    Wales W92000004                    37                 17315                    NA                   NA

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Copyright (c) 2020, Public Health England.