The Origin Story of Covid Reports
Since the spread of Corona virus started dominating the news, there's been several good sources of information how it is spreading and the impact, but there's many questions I couldn't find answers to:- How does our growth patter compare to other countries?
- What's the rate of change in different countries?
- How do the case densities (cases per population) compare and how are they changing?
- How does our testing rate compare to other countries?
- Does warm weather change how much things spread?
- How many cases are spread locally, vs brought in from somewhere else?
After a few failed attempts to get answers from the data out there, I decided to create a Google Sheet that would track information day to day where I could get the answers I was looking for. The nice thing about the Google Sheets is that I can make it available to anyone else to see as well.
The sheet is broken down into several tabs -- and I plan to create many more over time. The first tab is for the raw data. Every day, the new information for that day is added to this sheet and it automatically updates all the other tabs in the sheet.
The second tab is for the current status and it shows the most recent info and calculations from the data I have. Following that is a number of charts and sheets that show different analysis of the data.
Sources
There are many sources of data on the virus, but I've tried to use a few widely used sources for my core data. Most of the row labels in the raw data sheet will show you the source if you move your mouse over that cell. Here's what I used:
- Worldometers: This site gives daily updates of cases, recoveries, fatalities for every country and also has some pages for specific countries. The data changes throughout the day so it may be slightly different from other sources, but we're inputting new data around 11am EDT so it should be internally consistent.
- Our World In Data: This site does a country by country calculation of the projected number of days it would take for a country's case count to double, which shows acceleration. The same page also helpfully reports on the number of tests reported by various countries. The test data does not appear to be updated daily, so there are situations where the current number of cases can exceed the current number of tests because the test number is days behind the case figure.
- CDC Testing Report: Our World In Data is reporting a much lower number of tests than the CDC is, even for the same date. The US is doing tests through the CDC and private groups like Labcorp and Quest that I think is affecting the counts. One note on this page: It takes 4-6 days for all the test counts for a day to come in, so the most recent few days are very unreliable. I'm including them for the sake of the total count on current status, but if it looks like testing is dropping off, it just means all the data isn't in?
Countries Chosen
You're probably wondering "Why Chile and not Iran"? After trying to track the info on every country, I found the incremental value of Austria or Sweden was pretty low. I am very interested in whether warm weather reduces the spread of the virus, though, so I chose countries from Northern Hemisphere, Equatorial, and Southern Hemisphere regions to see how the climate might be a factor. Nearly all the virus started in the Northern hemisphere, but now almost every country has some cases. If warmer weather will stop the virus, you would expect countries around the equator that have warm weather year-round would have a much lower spread of cases. The southern hemisphere countries are almost starting autumn and also had their first cases much more recently for the most part, so I though it would be interesting how much they learn from the experiences of the northern countries. I left out Iran because there's no telling what they are doing and it doesn't seem like a helpful comparison for us.
Now that I've told you how I got to the data, I can start posting on what the data tells us.
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