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README.md

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 # excess_pi_covid
-Estimating excess mortality due to P&I in the US related to COVID-19
+Code for the manuscript "Estimating excess mortality due to P&I in the US related to COVID-19"
+
+By Daniel M. Weinberger, Jenny Chen, Ted Cohen, Forrest W. Crawford, Farzad Mostashari, Don Olson, Virginia E Pitzer, Nicholas G Reich, Marcus Russi, Lone Simonsen, Anne Watkins, Cecile Viboud 
+
+The goal for these analyses is to estimate excess mortality by state and for the entire US during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic. The main analysis file is us_pi_excess.Rmd. Estimates of reporting delays are made in the file under_reporting.Rmd.
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+The code is set up to automatically pull the latest version of data from NCHS. If you want to update regularly, change the option: maxage=hours(9999999)) around line 96. This determiens how often to update the data. E.g., if you want to update the data every 2 days, set this to hours(48). Otherwise, the program will use the most recent vintage of data available.