JobNmadu/COVID19-data-Nigeria-scrapping

COVID19 data sceapping from NCDC COVID19 data sceapping from Nigerian Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) On the advent of COVID-19 globally and since February 29, 2020 in Nigeria, motivations to provide visuals of the trends and how to behave responsibly was boosted by the publication of the first coronavirus package and the awesome animation of the province level by Krispin and Byrnes 2020. That immediately sent me working on how to animate the cases for Nigeria. However, this desire was met with short comings because the data publish at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU-CCSE) by the Nigerian Centre for Disease Control is agrregated nationally, whereas the animations that motivated me were regional for Australia. In addition, the daily updates only provide the regional details of the confirmed cases. The casualties, recoveries and active cases are provided in a single Table which combines all the categories as at the date of update. So daily casualties, recoveries, deaths abd active cases were not reported separately. Faced wiith this challenges, immediately sustainable solutions had to be found, which is scrapping data from the Table which is published in PDF. At the end of the day, four methods of scrapping the data were explored until I had to settle for one. The first method was to scrap the data from the PDF Table. The codes for that is provided. However, it was not efficient as the scrapped Table could not be separated into columns for further analysis. Anyone that has additional inputs is welcome. The second is to scrap the data from the website. The outcome of this method is better than that of the PDF but the thousand values were comma-separated, so, to use the data further, the commas had to be removed manually (see the codes). The third method is to use Excel to scrap the data. This proved more helpful that the first two and is easier to use as it does not require any coding. The pictures of the process are provided in the images folder. T …