Regex in R as a list for Quanteda
This doesn't seem like a great task for regex--even your pattern would miss very close typos like COWID-19 or potential OCR mistakes like C0VID-I9. Instead, I'd suggest using the stringdist package to do fuzzy matching, perhaps stringdist::afind to find approximate matches of &quot;COVID-19&quot;. You can read a bit about it here.
This will let you select from a variety of string distance algorithms and set a maximum distance. You could then, e.g., correct matches to &quot;COVID-19&quot; and proceed with your analysis.