Resources for Tracking the COVID-19 Epidemic

April 9, 2020

this post was inspired by this recent blogpost

It is easy to succumb to number overload when faced with the incredible volume of data available detailing the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus around the globe. As of the writing of this post, more than 1.5 million individuals have been confirmed to have contracted COVID-19 and nearly 90 thousand individuals have died. As the pandemic has progressed, dozens of dashboardsand even tutorials on how to make your own have been created to track the climbing numbers each day. With so many to choose from, how does one pick a trustworthy source? and what are the most important numbers to consider anyway?

Trustworthy sources

Fortunately, in this age of open data, there are a number of trustworthy sources of data on the spread of COVID-19. It seems like most dashboards draw from the Johns Hopkins (JHU) data feedof course, JHU also has their own (popular) dashboard, though I found the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control to also have an easy to access data stream (complete with example R code!).

The numbers being reported

Confirmed cases

The number of patients who have received a positive test.

This metric has some issues. First, it conflates two underlying processes: detection and prevalence. While most people look to this number as a proxy for prevalence, this approach is made difficult by the growing recognition of asymptomaticpeople who do not show any visible sign of being infected, but can nevertheless infect others carriers in the population. Such people are unlikely to be tested, meaning counts are almost certainly underestimates of the true number of cases.

Second, this number ignores the issues of test sensitivity and specificity. Put simply, it ignores the problem where (due to test failure) some of the people who test negative actually do have the disease and some of the people who test positive are actually healthy. This is because we just don’t know what these numbers are yet, though the focus seems to be on maximizing specificityminimizing the number of people who test positive, but are actually healthy. This compounds the asymptomatic issue, making these numbers doubly underestimates.

Finally, this number is monotonically increasingthe number can only go up over time. This means that what we actually care about is the rate of change in this number, rather than the absolute value per se. More on this later.

Active cases

The number of confirmed cases that have not yet died or recovered.

Though obviously relying on “confirmed cases,” and thus inheriting many of the associated issues mentioned above. This is an interesting metric insofar as it is the only one on this list that is not monotonic. This tracks the number of known infectious individuals in the population ata given time, and is expected to follow a typical epidemiological curve.

Deaths

The number of people whose “cause of death” is COVID-19.

I find this to be the most important number for a couple of reasons. First, it is the most dependable number—while there are some cases of people dying from co-morbidities which were exacerbated by SARS-CoV-2 or simply not being tested, the majority of people dying from COVID are identified and there are virtually no false positives.

Recovered

The number of people who survived known infections with SARS-CoV-2.

This number is obviously just the difference of confirmed cases and deaths, but can be useful in considering the proportion of the population with immunity to further infection. This proportion becomes particularly important when thinking about herd immunitywhen there are enough immune individuals in a population to inhibit further epidemics.

My top three dashboards

1. 91-DIVOC

This is my favorite visualization for understanding the spread of COVID-19. I look at each of the four main plots each day, and they have recently added the ability to keep track of county level data as well (which I use to keep tabs on friends and family across the country). On the main page, there are four plots, grouped into two classes. The first two look at absolute numbers at the country and US state levels, respectively. And the second two look at numbers normalized by population size, again for countries and US states.

There are two key elements to these plots that make them more informative than most. First, the plots horizontal axes are set by the number of days since a threshold level of cases was reached. This is really important, as it allows comparison across localities that were exposed to the virus at different times. Second, the plots vertical axis is in log scaling. Because these numbers are growing exponentially, a log-scaled axis makes the lines close to linear and provides an intuitive understanding of the doubling timethe amount of time necessary for there to be twice the current number of cases/deaths each location is experiencing.

In the first two plots, I tend to focus on the “New Cases/Day” and “New Deaths/Day” metrics. By looking only at the change in cases (deaths) from the previous day, we break the monoticity problem mentioned above. This also gets a little closer to the perspective of the inspiration piece mentioned at the top. Basically, I am looking for these curves to level off and begin to decline. This would signify that we are on the tail side of the epidemic curve and on our way toward reducing the total number of active cases.

In the second two, I focus on the “Active Cases” and “Deaths” metrics. Here, I am looking to compare curves across localities, by normalizing both the timeframe (scaling to days since a threshold was reached) and the number of cases (dividing by the population size), we put each locality on the same footing. Thus, we can see that (as of today) the US looks a lot more like Italy than the UK in terms of cases, but pretty similar to Sweden in terms of number of deaths.

2. University of Virginia

Similar to the popular JHU dashboard mentioned above, I like this one more mainly due to the functionality of the chart on the left side, where you can both switch the counts to daily (see above), and filter it to look at only the metric of interest (neither of which can be done on the JHU site).

3. A countervailing perspective

UPDATE (4 May 2020) : this site appears to no longer be functioning properly, so I have since stopped using it as a reference.

This is probably one you haven’t heard about. It is a relatively simple phenomonologicala model that only cares about prediction, not underlying mechanisms model that uses parameters from countries in the decline phase to inform the shape of the epidemiological curve for countries earlier in their outbreaks. Put simply, it is hard to know when the number of cases per day will begin to decline, so this model uses the numbers from places where that is already happening to make a more educated guess.

I like this model because it is providing a perspective that is very different from the prevailing media projections. I don’t know which will end up being more accurate, but I find that looking at this model helps keep me grounded.

Resources for Tracking the COVID-19 Epidemic - April 9, 2020 - Matthew J Michalska-Smith