1 Introduction

This is my attempt to generate some insight into publicly available COVID data to sate my curiosity about COVID specifically in my town of Redding CT, where I live. Redding’s First Selectperson is publishing some data and charts, but I wanted additional information.

The process of gathering the data, then transforming it into metrics and generating charts is perfromed in the R statisical computing environment, and reported here through a package named bookdown(Xie 2020).

Use of R is valuable because the code is a list of instructions to the computer for what I want the computer to do. The analysis is thereby transparent and reproducible when the code is shared. If a reader is curious about where a value or statistic “came from,” or disagrees with a method, they can review the code, and are free to comment or ask questions if they like.