Vaccine indicator added to Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker

H7 – Vaccination policy Today we published a new indicator recording policies for vaccine delivery to different groups of people – ranging from availability only for key groups (eg. essential workers, clinically vulnerable) to having the highest code being universal availability. We have also included a binary flag variable, to represent the cost to individuals for the vaccine. More information about this is available on Github – our codebook has already been updated, and other documentation will be updated in the coming days.

Impact on indices We are including H7 in two of our indices: the Containment and Health Index and the overall Government Response Index. This applies retroactively: it will affect index values for past dates. And in general, it will have the effect of reducing variance in those indices for past dates, because it is the same value for every jurisdiction (0) in the past. This also means that analysis and results using these indices may change. If you prefer the previous construction without H7, please feel free to use our index methodology to create your own index. We’re more than happy to discuss how this can be done.

Combined CSV, actually working this time In my last email towards the end of November, I mentioned that we had produced a new CSV of ‘combined’ indicator values. A gremlin in the system meant that for a period, we were just publishing our main CSV and renaming it ‘combined’. This has been fixed, and the new CSV is now up on our GitHub: data/OxCGRT_latest_combined.csv For reference, I have pasted below my signature the description from the last email.

Feel free to get in touch if you have questions about any of this.

Cheers, Toby

Toby Phillips | Executive Director Oxford Covid-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) Blavatnik School of Government | University of Oxford p. +44 1865 614299 | e. toby.phillips@bsg.ox.ac.uk | @TobyMPhillips w: bsg.ox.ac.uk/covidtracker

From previous update email

Creation of 'combined' CSV that includes the policy level and the geographic scope in a single variable For most of our indicators we publish two variables: the level of the policy (ordinal number), and the geographic scope (a binary flag depending on whether it is a nationwide policy, or just localised in one or more targeted areas). Many people that use OxCGRT data ignore the scope flag for simplicity. We have now created a CSV that reports a single 'combined' value for each indicator where a targeted policy is treated as a half-step. For instance, school and university closures are recorded as C1=3 if they apply nationwide. If these closures only occured in one state or territory, not across the whole country, we would report C1_combined=2.5. The CSV can be found here: https://github.com/OxCGRT/covid-policy-tracker/blob/master/data/OxCGRT_latest_combined.csv

This uses the same as the methodology we use when aggregating data for our indices (including the Stringency Index), and you can read the methodology here: https://github.com/OxCGRT/covid-policy-tracker/blob/master/documentation/index_methodology.md#calculating-sub-index-scores-for-each-indicator

como-ph / oxcgrt

Vaccine indicator added to Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker #45