Coronavirus and Charts
Two podcasts on coronavirus visualizations and charts.
Coronavirus Visualizations
Sure, so as a person who has a background both in public health and data, when we look at how we actually track information about an emerging epidemic, the data that we have available about cases is the best we know, right? When you start to look at the modifying words on cases, even though we may refer to it that way, you’re looking at things like confirmed cases. And those confirmed cases could be cases that have been laboratory-confirmed by a CDC laboratory. At a lower level, those confirmed cases could include cases that we usually called presumptive positive cases in the CDC reporting, that then are cases that were confirmed in a local laboratory, but not validated at a CDC laboratory. You can start to see the complexity as you break down all these different kinds of cases that we have out there. We have the added challenge that without robust widespread testing, we don’t have a really clear denominator on how many cases we even have in the US or some other countries. A country that’s done a lot more widespread testing, like South Korea, has done a lot more work to actually capture a more accurate denominator and actually have a better understanding of the share of their population who were infected. And so there are a lot of challenges and how we quantify that case information, and we’re seeing that now with the public health recommendations being put out there, that if you are not going to have a materially different experience, in terms of the treatment from the medical system, that you may not qualify to be tested, even if you show a lot of the symptoms of COVID-19. So, it’s going to be hard to actually ever have- until we have some way of quantifying who was infected previously to other kinds of tests, it’ll be really difficult to have a really accurate denominator for what the total case volume was.
Episode #170: DataViz in the Time of COVID
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