state, us, data_dictionary: The vaccination data web scraped daily from this CDC vaccination dashboard: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations. Specifically, we use the following CDC API (https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/COVIDData/getAjaxData?id=vaccin...) to download the data daily at 1 PM EDT and 5 PM EDT. You can find some definitions of the data fields being displayed on the CDC dashboard here and information on how the CDC compiles the data here. But as far as we can tell, this API is mostly undocumented and contains many more fields than is visible on the CDC dashboard. Below are the fields we make use of from the API and what we believe they represent:
state_timeseries, us_timeseries, timeseries_data_dictionary: In addition to the CDC API, we also pull a timeseries version of the CDC data from the Our World in Data repository. This data is compiled by the Our World in Data team daily from the same CDC dashboard, but they also maintain a timeseries record going back to January 12, 2021. We download their data daily from this URL: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/owid/covid-19-data/master/public/data/.... The code that performs the web scraping daily can be found here: https://github.com/ajjitn/covid-vaccines-scraping .
state_acs_data, state_data_only: Demographic data for each state and the US were pulled from the American Community Survey’s 2019 five-year estimates published by the US Census Bureau. The research team used the tidycensus R package to pull race, ethnicity, age, median income, and total population breakdowns. We also compiled employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to capture industry-specific estimates as of May 2019 for two groups: educational services (sector 61 link to BLS XLS) and health care and social assistance (sector 62: link to BLS XLS). The research team filtered the data to get top-line sector-wide estimates at the state-level, and calculated employment percentages based on the total population estimates from the ACS data . The R script to pull the ACS and BLS data is available in our github repo: https://github.com/ajjitn/covid-vaccines-scraping .
Tile_Map, state_polygons: Helper datasets used by Tableau to generate the map of all states in the US. These are just a listing of all the states in the US and the polygon vertices that make up each state.