It’s been one year!

(This is NOT a celebration! It’s just a notice of the passing of time.)

Well, I didn’t realize one year has passed. I thought the lockdowns began sometime around March 17th which would be sometime next week but the actual pronouncement by the WHO organization that the coronavirus had achieved pandemic status apparently happened on March 11th. At least that is my understanding.

I read something that after the WHO announcement, the NBA cancelled the season in the midst of a game. Further research on the web indicates that the season was suspended due to one of the players receiving a positive from a test result.

Anyway, we hit the one year milestone according to those keeping track of such things.

Man, it is strange to think what we have all gone through and are still going through. If we can hold to the discipline on social distancing and masks for a few more months until enough people get vaccinated, we could be looking at a lot happier end of the year (provided we survive this year’s hurricane season). I’m crossing my fingers that the variants that are percolating out there does not start a fourth surge before we get enough people vaccinated. It’s a race now.

Right now I’m still in the midst of transitioning my files from the Covid Tracking Project to other data sources – mainly the CDC – so I think this week’s posts will be on the light side.

Here are some things that I noted for the updates on cases and deaths:

Wikipedia updates their information on the day of, so if I want 3/12/2021 data (today’s date), I can be pretty certain to be able to pull it by 9 pm (I think updates happen earlier but by 9 pm, I’m certain to retrieve the data).

The Covid Tracking Project also had the same kind of updates as Wikipedia, maybe a little bit later in the day than Wiki – maybe around 5 or 6 pm.

The John Hopkins University data (JHU) is usually updated by the following morning, so to get 3/12/2021, I would have to wait until tomorrow morning (3/13/2021).

The CDC data – which the Covid Tracking Project says tracks very closely to what they get – gets updated in the afternoon of the following day; thus, if I want 3/12/2021. I would have to wait until the afternoon of 3/13/2021.

The hospitalization data from the CDC looks like it is weekly. The data is reported for each day but gets updated on the CDC site weekly.

Now, back to work on updating my files….