README.Rmd

---
title: "Vaccines by county in Germany"
output: github_document
---

# Introduction
This project is mainly considered as a exercise in the usage of git (and GitHub), Rstudio and possibly developing a shiny App.
Based on the vaccination data published by the RKI this project will focus on creating a visualization of the development of 
vaccinations administered on county level. 

# Data
As mentioned the main data originates directly from the data published by the RKI. It's divided into date of vaccination applied, vaccination place based on county id, vaccination category (first, second or third shot), age group and a count of applied vaccinations in a given county. To achieve a better usability and readability of the county id, which is derived from the AGS (amtlicher Gemeindeschlüssel), I matched the vaccination table to data acquired from regionalstatistik.de  (see References for further information). This allowed me to create an easily searchable string where either county id or county (or in some cases city) name can be provided to find the desired vaccination place.

# The Shiny App  
This section briefly describes the shiny app and covers user inputs and visualization description.  
### User Selection  
The Shiny application allows currently for three different user selections. Vaccination place, vaccination categories and time-period.  
1. **Vaccination place:** Uses county id or name. Currently only one county/ city can be selected.  
2. **Vaccination category:** Select first, second, third shot or all three. Every category is displayed by a single graph.  
3. **Time-Period:** Allows for a period specification. Default is always the global earliest and latest data point in the vaccination data. A special behaviour is triggered when selecting only one day (line graph changes to a bar-plot).  
### Output  
First and foremost the app provides a visualization of the vaccinations applied in a given county by drawing a line graph based on the cumulative sum of administered vaccines. An exception occurs if a single day is selected. In this case a simple bar plot is drawn (one column per category). Below the graph a table summarises the end sum of vaccinations per chosen category in the selected period. 

# Future Plans
In the future it's planned to extend the user input possibilities and allow for the selection of different age groups. Also a text field informing about the last update-date of the vaccination-data would increase reliability.
Another possible future idea would be to look beyond ggplot as the main plot engine and try another more interactive solution (e.g. dygraphs).

# References
Robert Koch-Institut (2021): COVID-19-Impfungen in Deutschland, Berlin: Zenodo. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5126652 
  
Statistische Ämter des Bundes und der Länder, Regionalstatistik: 11111-01-01-5 Gebietsfläche in qkm - Stichtag 31.12. -
regionale Tiefe: Gemeinden, URL: tinyurl.com/agsdatasource