A photoset of various places all over the world that are now abandoned as everybody is staying home now.
This site uses cell phone GPS data to rate how close to home people are staying. The Surveillance State at its best! Encouraging to see King county is doing well anyway
This is along the lines of Pinboard’s controversial take from the other day that we need to employ data that lots of company’s and the government collects but is hidden because of privacy concerns.
King County Public Health has a new dashboard that shows a lot more detailed information
You can see it breaks down numbers to the zip code level. There are 206 confirmed cases and 1 death in my zip code.
The UI is pretty clunky and really slow to load. It looks like it’s using tableau. I expect it will improve day to day.
Time series data for the US compiled by the New York Times. A pair of csv files broken by state and county. Finally!
This video shows a lot of simulations of viral propagation. Examines the effects of social distancing, isolating cases, and also the effect of having central locations that everyone travels to. The animations of everything are really good at getting the point across.
We’re getting this but only if we keep the hammer down for another few weeks.
Well, I’m not a legal scholar but I think the legal term for what this guy is doing is “talking out of his ass.”
I see a fair amount of speculation that COVID-19 is a deliberate attempt at some kind of biological warfare. I haven’t seen any evidence presented for that theory. This article reports on actual scientists who have examined the question and found it wanting.
Andersen assembled a team of evolutionary biologists and virologists, including Garry, from several countries to analyze the virus for clues that it could have been human-made, or grown in and accidentally released from a lab.
“We said, ‘Let’s take this theory — of which there are multiple different versions — that the virus has a non-natural origin … as a serious potential hypothesis,’ ” Andersen says.
Meeting via Slack and other virtual portals, the researchers analyzed the virus’s genetic makeup, or RNA sequence, for clues about its origin.
It was clear “almost overnight” that the virus wasn’t human-made, Andersen says. Anyone hoping to create a virus would need to work with already known viruses and engineer them to have desired properties.
A nice presentation of a model that attempts to project the capacity of the health care system to handle the case load over the next few months.
You can see that Washington state is doing pretty well
Thanks to @gdyckmd for the link.
This Nature article summarizes research conducted on the passengers of the Diamond Princess cruise ship that was quarantined on February 3 in Japanese waters. Since the population was isolated and everyone received testing, often multiple times, it makes a good controlled study of the characteristics of the virus and possibly measure the effectiveness of quarantine efforts.
The DP-3T protocol stands for Decentralized Privacy Preserving Proximity Tracing. It’s a clever way to establish contact tracing in a way that doesn’t compromise privacy. The idea is that you would implement this protocol using a standard cell phone and it could keep track of contacts.
There is a useful comic that explains it
This is a pretty good explainer about why the COVID-19 outbreak is not like the flu. It’s all about the trends. There is a good graph which shows pretty well
One thing I did not know is that the flu deaths are normally combined with pneumonia since it exhibits “flu-like symptoms”.
This is a fantastic set of interactive graphs with COVID-19 data
I might even be able to embed one here
[Nope, I can’t embed it but I can one-box it.]
Everything is sourced and the data is downloadable.
Found another good perspective on data and recommendations — http://www.jasgeorgia.org/resources/Programs-Events/Events/COVID%20Shock%202.pdf
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I will look up more on “Our World In Data” … and … would be grateful for anyone else’s insight on its validity, reputation, sources, etc. If it shows a high enough level of quality and objectivity, I can see promoting it more.
Thanks for any insight on “Our World In Data”.
This article makes me feel pretty good about my City/State, but it also is exasperating to see how little of this is going on elsewhere and at the national level.
Get the politicians out and put the experts front and center. Why do we have so much trouble doing that here?
I love these genetic tracing stories. This kind of stuff feels a lot more like programming (and especially debugging) software.
It’s common to hear that it’ll take 18 months to get a coronavirus vaccine. I’m afraid that sounds a bit like magical thinking. It’d be great and the smart people are saying it’s possible but this article lays out what needs to happen.
I really like these interactive explainer things. This is the future of on-line curriculum, or at least it should be. Imaging teaching kids physics thing this kind of thing. It is still pretty difficult to pull off but the tools for creating these things are getting more and more powerful.
This kinda aligns with my thinking lately so of course I’m going to link to it.
“I’m quite certain that this is going to go in waves,” she added. “It won’t be a tsunami that comes across America all at once and then retreats all at once. It will be micro-waves that shoot up in Des Moines and then in New Orleans and then in Houston and so on, and it’s going to affect how people think about all kinds of things.”