get_timeseries: Retrieve time series data from the 'SurvStat' web service.

In rsurvstat: Download Infectious Disease Data from 'SurvStat' (Robert Koch Institute)

Retrieve time series data from the SurvStat web service.

Description

This function gets a weekly timeseries of disease count or incidence data from the Robert Koch Institute SurvStat web service. The timeseries can be stratified by any combination of age, geography, disease, disease subtype. Queries to SurvStat are cached and paged, but obviously multidimensional extracts have the potential to need a lot of downloading.

Usage

get_timeseries(
  disease = NULL,
  measure = c("Count", "Incidence"),
  ...,
  age_group = NULL,
  age_range = c(0, Inf),
  disease_subtype = FALSE,
  years = NULL,
  geography = NULL,
  trim_zeros = c("leading", "both", "none"),
  .progress = TRUE
)

Arguments

disease	the disease of interest as a SurvStat key, see rsurvstat::diseases for a current list of these. This is technically optional, and if omitted the counts of all diseases will be returned. Keys are the same as the options in the SurvStat user interface found here. IfSG and state variants of diseases are counts that are reported directly to the Robert Koch Institute or indirectly via state departments.
measure	one of "Count" (default) or "Incidence" per 100,000 per week or year depending on the context.
...	not used, must be empty.
age_group	(optional) the age group of interest as a SurvStat key, see rsurvstat::age_groups for a list of valid options.
age_range	(optional) a length 2 vector with the minimum and maximum ages to consider
disease_subtype	if TRUE the returned count will be broken down by disease or pathogen subtype (assuming disease was provided).
years	(optional) a vector of years to limit the response to. This may be useful to limit the size of returned pages in the event the SurvStat service hits a data transfer limit.
geography	(optional) a geographical breakdown. This can be given as a character where it must be one of state, nuts, or county specifying the 16 region FedStateKey71Map, 38 region NutsKey71Map, or 411 region CountyKey71Map data respectively. Alternatively it can be given as a as a sf dataframe, subsetting one of these maps, in which case only that subset of regions will be returned.
trim_zeros	get rid of zero counts. Either "both" (from start and end), "leading" (from start only - the default) or "none".
.progress	by default a progress bar is shown, which may be important if many downloads are needed to fulfil the request. It can be disabled by setting this to FALSE here.

Value

a data frame with at least date (weekly), and one of count or incidence columns. Most likely it will also have disease_name and disease_code columns, and some of age_name, age_code, age_low, age_high, geo_code, geo_name, disease_subtype_code, disease_subtype_name depending on options. The dataframe will be grouped to make sure each group contains a single timeseries.

Examples

# age stratified
get_timeseries(
  diseases$`COVID-19`,
  measure = "Count",
  age_group = age_groups$children_coarse
) %>% dplyr::glimpse()

# geographic
get_timeseries(
  diseases$`COVID-19`,
  measure = "Count",
  geography = "state"
) %>% dplyr::glimpse()

# disease stratified, subset of years:
get_timeseries(
  measure = "Count",
  years = 2024
) %>% dplyr::glimpse()

rsurvstat documentation built on Feb. 20, 2026, 5:09 p.m.