nCov2019: an R package for studying the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic

BACKGROUND: The global spreading of the COVID-19 coronavirus is still a serious public health challenge. Although there are a large number of public resources that provide statistics data, tools for retrospective historical data and convenient visualization are still valuable. To provide convenient access to data and visualization on the pandemic we developed an R package, nCov2019 (https://github.com/YuLab-SMU/nCov2019). METHODS: We collect stable and reliable data of COVID-19 cases from multiple authoritative and up-to-date sources, and aggregate the most recent and historical data for each country or even province. Medical progress information, including global vaccine development and therapeutics candidates, were also collected and can be directly accessed in our package. The nCov2019 package provides an R language interfaces and designed functions for data operation and presentation, a set of interfaces to fetch data subset intuitively, visualization methods, and a dashboard with no extra coding requirement for data exploration and interactive analysis. RESULTS: As of January 14, 2021, the global health crisis is still serious. The number of confirmed cases worldwide has reached 91,268,983. Following the USA, India has reached 10 million confirmed cases. Multiple peaks are observed in many countries. Under the efforts of researchers, 51 vaccines and 54 drugs are under development and 14 of these vaccines are already in the pre-clinical phase. DISCUSSION: The nCov2019 package provides detailed statistics data, visualization functions and the Shiny web application, which allows researchers to keep abreast of the latest epidemic spread overview.