Like many of us, I’ve been frustrated by the lack of availability, and/or coherence, of data on the Covid-19 pandemic. Every state has a tracking site, and most counties as well, and the CDC puts up a lot of data…. but most of theirs is ‘contaminated’ by flu and ‘Influenza-like illness’ data, as those who have read my last 2 diaries learned.
WorldOMeters is particularly valuable — I use it all the time.
The Covid Tracking Project has lots of good stuff, including some hard-to-find numbers on hospitalizations, ventilator use and deaths.
Algebris, an Italian investment firm, was doing a great set of graphs until it stopped updating on April 5. I hope they’re OK, but haven’t been able to find out anything about what happened.
FWIW, here’s one of the great graphs from the Algebris site — It was where I first realized just how bad things are going to get if we don’t get our shit together…. at least as together as Italy, and hopefully as good as China:
When Italy blew through Hubei’s cases per 10,000 with no sign of slowing down, back around March 22, it really sank in how bad this is. The graph above ends on April 5, so I grabbed the data and made an updated version, showing Hubei, Italy and the USA:
As this graph shows, the USA has been on essentially the same new case trajectory as Italy since the novel coronavirus got a foothold in either country. FYI, the 100 confirmed case date for Italy was 2/23/2020 and in the USA it was ¾/2020 (OK, kos, you forced that to be three-quarters of 2020, neat!) that’s March 4. BTW, the upward jog in Hubei province was the result of a change in reporting criteria in China.
So we have been following Italy, which isn’t surprising, since we have been doing almost as good a job as Italy on mitigation (I don’t think Italy has problems like Trumpies protesting, churches defying lockdown orders or wide-open beaches [YAY, FLORIDA!])
It’s also very obvious that we have NOT been doing whatever China did to beat this virus down (no, not beat it to death, just suppress it very effectively). Following about 2 weeks behind Italy, we seem bound and determined to repeat all of their mistakes, while refusing to learn anything from the one country that did beat this virus down. For more on that subject, see my previous diary here.
Sorry, I got off on a tangent, which is easy enough to do these days — back to the purpose stated in the attention-grabbing headline!
In searching for new and better data sources, I happened upon the New York Times Coronavirus Outbreak Tracker. WOW! They have the best state, county and city/metro area data and visualizations I have found, and I’ve seen a lot. Be sure to poke around — there are several different pages with different visualizations, and even a county-level database which can be downloaded and easily converted into an Excel file.
Some or many of you have probably found the NYT page, but for those who haven’t, by all means take a look. There’s a lot to look at and digest.
Of particular note — to me at least — in the graph at the top of this diary are the traces of Seattle city and Lombardy province, Italy. Both locked down very early — Lombardy by March 11 and Seattle around the same time — and both have been fighting very hard to suppress the virus.
Seattle is being held up as a success story — to the extent there is such a thing these days outside of Hubei province — but look closely at the top graph….. for all Seattle’s work, suffering, deprivation and adherence to draconian lock-down orders, they still — after 6 weeks — haven’t been able to ‘bend the curve’ of new (known) infections down to where they can seriously consider moving from mitigation to containment.
Just to put this in perspective, according to the graph, Seattle, a city of 744,000 is recording about .5 cases per 1.000 per week, or 372 per week = 53 per day. Lombardy is a province of about 10 million, so 1 per 1,000 = 10,000 per week = 1,429 per day. Don’t forget that estimates of undiagnosed cases range from 5 to 80 TIMES the number of positive tests….. OH SHIT!
Containment is mostly about fever screening (NOT testing) and contact tracing. As we start looking down that tunnel towards coming out of lockdown, we have to face some unfortunate realizations:
1. This disease is more highly contagious than we like to admit — google the WHO study and the Los Alamos study for more information on R0
2. Asymptomatic transmission is common
3. No country other than China has been able to beat the first wave of the virus back down to where they could go back into containment mode and start opening back up again, and we (and they) are about to start finding out whether that actually works as they pass 14 days since relaxing their mitigation measures
4. Our mitigation efforts in the USA seem to be, at best, keeping the virus/disease from overwhelming us (and our healthcare system), but are falling short of what is required to successfully beat it down (ala China)
5. Any state/county/city in this country that isn’t doing fully adequate contact tracing may think they are ‘fine’, but in reality they are probably just a few weeks behind the current hot spots on the upward trajectory. Why? See #1 and #2 above.
OK, so I hooked you with a (hopefully) catchy headline, lured you down the page with some neat graphics as I digressed, finally got to the reason for this diary, then climbed up on my soapbox.
Yeah, my nice, quick diary to pass on a good data source got long and windey (and windy). If you like or don’t like the way I am presenting stuff, please let me know…… talk about confirmation bias! You probably couldn’t get all the way down here if you didn’t like it! Seriously, all comments and (constructive) criticism is welcomed.
Cheers.