This repository contains code for data processing and modeling of COVID-19 reproduction number R_t using the model that was developed for https://rt.live.

While the implementation of the model is completely country-independent, the code has a high-level interface that allows for easy plug-in support of new countries.

The rt.live site itself (for the United States) runs the model hosted at rtcovidlive/covid-model, on which this further work was based. Other sites like rtlive.de run the code in this repository.

• Explanation of the model
• Details on data loading/preprocessing

We learned that artifacts in data often require manual intervention to be fixed. At the same time, data loading and processing must be fully automated to support running the data processing for tens or hundreds of regions every day.

In this repository, we implemented a generalized data loading & processing interface that allows for:

• supporting countries at national AND OR regional level
• implementing country-specific interpolation / extrapolation / data cleaning routines
• manual outlier removal & corrections

Contributions to add/improve country support are very welcome!

To contribute data sources, fix data outliers, or improve data quality for a specific country, please open a PR for the corresponding data_xy.py file in rtlive/sources.

Furthermore, we welcome contributions regarding...

• testing
• robustness against data outliers
• computational performance
• model insight

To reference this project in a scientific article:

Kevin Systrom, Thomas Vladek and Mike Krieger. Rt.live (2020). GitHub repository, https://github.com/rtcovidlive/covid-model

or with the respective BibTeX entry:

@misc{rtlive2020,
  author = {Systrom, Kevin and Vladek, Thomas and Krieger, Mike},
  title = {Project Title},
  year = {2020},
  publisher = {GitHub},
  journal = {GitHub repository},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/rtcovidlive/covid-model}},
  commit = {...}
}