smallpox {fastbeta}

Smallpox Mortality in London, England, 1661-1930

Description

Time series of deaths due to smallpox, deaths due to all causes, and births in London, England, from 1661 to 1930, as recorded in the London Bills of Mortality and the Registrar General's Weekly Returns.

Usage

data(smallpox, package = "fastbeta")

Format

A data frame with 13923 observations of 5 variables:

from

start date of the record.

nday

length of the record, which is the number of days (typically 7) over which deaths and births were counted.

smallpox

count of deaths due to smallpox.

allcauses

count of deaths due to all causes.

births

count of births.

Source

A precise description of the data set and its correspondence to the original source documents is provided in the reference.

A script generating the smallpox data frame from a CSV file accompanying the reference is available as system.file("scripts", "smallpox.R", package = "fastbeta").

References

Krylova, O. & Earn, D. J. D. (2020). Patterns of smallpox mortality in London, England, over three centuries. PLOS Biology, 18(12), Article e3000506, 1-27. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.3000506

Examples

data(smallpox, package = "fastbeta")
str(smallpox)
table(smallpox[["nday"]]) # not all 7 days, hence:
plot(7 * smallpox / as.double(nday) ~ from, smallpox, type = "l")