Are we nearing the end?
It kind of feels like things are improving in the US with the general mood getting more and more positive by the day. My own town has seen tremendous drops on the number of coronavirus cases; it’s just been amazing to see those numbers drop in the last week or so.
Here are some graphics on how each of the regions in the US are faring:
(Sources of data are listed at bottom of post. Basically, they all come from Wikipedia.)
It looks like every state is showing declining number of cases. There are a few here and there (Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan) whose daily count appears to ride over the other states in its region but still, most if not all states have improved since February.
Here’s another view that shows each state individually in its region:
Alabama had a surprising jump in the number of cases in the last few days but I’m hoping that is an artifact of delayed reporting (the news seem to suggest that). But I do admit to feeling concerned about our rising spirits: where have I seen that before?
India. In March or April, the country celebrated that they had “conquered” the virus and that they were immune to it. Their daily case count dipped down to around the 10,000 per day levels so the leaders opened up the country. People celebrated in crowded festivals and rallies were held around the country.
And then…the virus began a.TERRIFYING.SURGE.
In Image 7, the violet purple is India, red is Turkey and blue is Iran in the little graph on the upper right hand side. In Image 8, you can see that in February the daily case counts hovered around 10K.
It looks like only in the last week the case count have started to decline. Hallelujah! But the news say that only in the cities, where the more wealthy lives, are seeing the decline; the rural, where access to healthcare is non-existent, are seeing the surge. It sounds like the numbers I see are really numbers about the cities and not the rural areas because testing is non-existent, so we have no clue about what is going on in the rural areas of India. So that decline in the graph might not be a real decline.
Meanwhile, the US is at the 30,000 per day level, not 10K. The only hope I have for avoiding that terrifying surge is that we have more people vaccinated. India did not have many people vaccinated (maybe 1 to 2%?) whereas we have more.
I hope that is enough to protect us.
Sources of Data
WORLD : Cases and deaths from Wikipedia website https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_by_country_and_territory
US and STATES : Five main sources of data are available – Wikipedia, COVID Tracking Project, CDC, JHU, and HHS
Wikipedia: Wikipedia has broken out their tables into four links, separating out the cases from deaths and separating out the years.
New Cases 2021: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:2019–20_coronavirus_pandemic_data/United_States_medical_cases
New Cases 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:COVID-19_pandemic_data/United_States_daily_cases_in_2020
New Deaths 2021: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:COVID-19_pandemic_data/United_States_daily_deaths
New Deaths 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:COVID-19_pandemic_data/United_States_daily_deaths_in_2020
COVID Tracking Project: The COVID Tracking Project was a collaborative effort of free labor overseen by The Atlantic. This project ended on 3/7/2021. The Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project was provided under Common Creative license “CC BY-NC-4.0” and covered cases, deaths, hospitalization, and positivity, amongst other data.
API: https://covidtracking.com/api/v1/states/daily.csv
Table: daily
CDC: CDC has become a replacement for the COVID Tracking Project for me although the data will often come in a few days later. Hospitalization comes in a week later. I’m tracking cases, deaths, hospitalization, and positivity.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, COVID-19 Response. COVID-19 Case Surveillance Public Data Access, Summary, and Limitations
Table: rows
API:
Cases and deaths: https://data.cdc.gov/api/views/9mfq-cb36/rows.csv
Hospitalization: https://beta.healthdata.gov/api/views/g62h-syeh/rows.csv (Good data doesn’t start until about 7/15/2020)
Testing: https://beta.healthdata.gov/api/views/j8mb-icvb/rows.csv
Positivity: https://beta.healthdata.gov/api/views/j8mb-icvb/rows.csv
John Hopkins University (JHU): I rarely show these sets of data; I mostly use Wikipedia or CDC but sometimes I like to reference the JHU.
Please cite our Lancet Article for any use of this data in a publication (link)
Provided by Johns Hopkins University
Center for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CSSE):
https://systems.jhu.edu/
Terms of Use:
1. This data set is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) by the Johns Hopkins University on behalf of its Center for Systems Science in Engineering. Copyright Johns Hopkins University 2020.
2. Attribute the data as the “COVID-19 Data Repository by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University” or “JHU CSSE COVID-19 Data” for short, and the
url: https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19.
3. For publications that use the data, please cite the following publication: “Dong E, Du H, Gardner L. An interactive web-based dashboard to track COVID-19 in real time. Lancet Inf Dis. 20(5):533-534. doi: 10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30120-1”
Website https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19
HHS: Hospitalization data for US – can be US level, state level or county level
