Digital Surveillance Sensors

This is the documentation of the API for accessing the Digital Surveillance Sensors (sensors) endpoint of the Delphi’s epidemiological data.

General topics not specific to any particular endpoint are discussed in the API overview. Such topics include: contributing, citing, and data licensing.

Delphi’s Digital Surveillance Sensors Data

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Note: this repository was built to support modeling and forecasting efforts surrounding seasonal influenza (and dengue). In the current COVID-19 pandemic, syndromic surveillance data, like ILI data (influenza-like illness) through FluView, will likely prove very useful. However, we urge caution to users examining the digital surveillance sensors, like ILI Nearby, Google Flu Trends, etc., during the COVID-19 pandemic, because these were designed to track ILI as driven by seasonal influenza, and were NOT designed to track ILI during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The API

The base URL is: https://api.delphi.cmu.edu/epidata/sensors/

See this documentation for details on specifying epiweeks, dates, and lists.

Parameters

Required

Parameter	Description	Type
epiweeks	epiweeks	list of epiweeks
locations	locations	list of region/state labels
names	sensor names	list of string

Notes:

• Names of open sensors (no auth token required): sar3, epic, arch
• Names of sensors requiring auth token: twtr, gft, ght, ghtj, cdc, quid, wiki

Optional

Parameter	Description	Type
auth	sensor authentication tokens (currently restricted to 1); can be global or granular	list of string

Response

Field	Description	Type
result	result code: 1 = success, 2 = too many results, -2 = no results	integer
epidata	list of results	array of objects
epidata[].name	sensor name	string
epidata[].location		string
epidata[].epiweek		integer
epidata[].value		float
message	success or error message	string

Example URLs

Delphi’s Digital Surveillance SAR3 Sensor on 2020w01 (national)

https://api.delphi.cmu.edu/epidata/sensors/?names=sar3&locations=nat&epiweeks=202001

{
  "result": 1,
  "epidata": [
    {
      "name": "sar3",
      "location": "nat",
      "epiweek": 202001,
      "value": 6.2407
    }
  ],
  "message": "success"
}

Code Samples

Libraries are available for JavaScript, Python, and R. The following samples show how to import the library and fetch national Delphi’s Digital Surveillance SAR3 Sensor data for epiweeks 201940 and 202001-202010 (11 weeks total).

JavaScript (in a web browser)

<!-- Imports -->
<script src="delphi_epidata.js"></script>
<!-- Fetch data -->
<script>
  EpidataAsync.sensors('nat', 'sar3', [201940, EpidataAsync.range(202001, 202010)]).then((res) => {
    console.log(res.result, res.message, res.epidata != null ? res.epidata.length : 0);
  });
</script>

Python

Optionally install the package using pip(env):

pip install delphi-epidata

Otherwise, place delphi_epidata.py from this repo next to your python script.

# Import
from delphi_epidata import Epidata
# Fetch data
res = Epidata.sensors(['nat'], ['sar3'], [201940, Epidata.range(202001, 202010)])
print(res['result'], res['message'], len(res['epidata']))

R

# Import
source('delphi_epidata.R')
# Fetch data
res <- Epidata$sensors(list('nat'), list('sar3') list(201940, Epidata$range(202001, 202010)))
cat(paste(res$result, res$message, length(res$epidata), "\n"))