cmu-delphi/delphi-epidata

Make `covid_hosp` failures more informative

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#1,248 opened on Jul 28, 2023

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Description

covid_hosp recently ran into an outage that did not fail gracefully and took a while to debug. With better error messaging, we can better diagnose these issues in the future.

TL;DR: This outage was caused metadata dataset provided by healthdata.gov being changed URLs suddenly (probably unintentionally) and temporarily.

A more complete outage report from @melange396 can be found here

Contributor guide

Research direction
Examine the `covid hosp` function in the codebase to identify where it fetches data from healthdata.gov. Look for error handling around URL requests and add more descriptive error messages that indicate the source of failure, such as unexpected changes in the metadata dataset URL.
Tech stack
python
Domain
apidatabackend
Issue type
Bug
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
2
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
Half day
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
Fresh
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
Clear
Prerequisites
Python
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
70