NOTE: As of the end of 2022, this repository has been archived due to Heroku no longer supporting free dynos, as well as NZ returning to normality.
nz-covid-tracker is a Twitter bot tweeting updates to both COVID-19 vaccination and cases status in New Zealand. It operates using a couple of simple python scripts and a mongoDB database. The database simply stores the last data and date update on the website to check whether new data has been posted or not.
There are a total of 6 different status updates the bot can post, which can be found under src/tweets - 3 cases update tweets and 3 vaccination update tweets. The bot attempts to tweet each of these 1 once a day between 10AM and 8PM in 2 hour intervals. If the data has not been updated the status update will be skipped for the day.
A seperate scraping script checks the health.govt.nz website every hour for potential data updates and scrapes the website if there is new data, although the data is only typically updated between 1pm and 2pm.
The bot should be up and running on Twitter @covid19_nz.