Cases and deaths: New source, technical details

[lucasrodes]

All our cases and death indicators have relied on JHU's dataset. Since JHU is ceasing updates, we are changing our source for these indicators to WHO. You can read more about this at #2784.

This is a central issue, listing all the necessary changes when switching our source from JHU to WHO in the context of case/death indicators.

Preparation

The following items are not sorted in any particular order. Some of them can be done in parallel. Ideally, all these tasks should be finished by February 27th.

• Implement new tool: New command tool to download, process and add case and death data from WHO to Grapher.
  • data(cases-deaths): new tool to inject data from the WHO #2783
  • enhance(cases-deaths): docstrings #2790
• Check tool: Add a check command to ensure case/death data is up to date: cowid check casedeath.
  • PR: Feat: check that case/death data has been updated #2788
• Prepare changes our GitHub documentation:
  • Requirements:
    • All our documentation on cases/deaths mentions JHU as our source. This will change once we switch to WHO.
    • We want to signal that in the past, we relied on JHU but changed to WHO.
  • PR: Documentation: Cases and deaths #2787
• Preliminary integration new data into our complete dataset
  • New temporary file for now, e.g. owid-covid-data-new.csv, for debugging purposes. It sources case/death data from WHO instead of JHU.
  • PR: Megafile(cases,deaths): Update tools to use data from WHO  #2789

Actual change

The changes will be reflected in our datasets and documentation on this repository (as well as on our site) on the 8th of March.

• Data change: Our dataset will no longer use JHU's data and will start using WHO's:
  • Data: Start using WHO as main source #2792
• Documentation change: All references to JHU in this repository will be replaced by the corresponding ones to the WHO.
  • Documentation: Cases and deaths #2787