COVID-19 Three Day Change Report

In my ongoing quest to present the Coronavirus data from the CDC and WHO in useful ways, I have created another set of report pages. There are to primary pages that show all countries with the percent of change in non-recovered cases in the past three days. Our previous reports provided a lot of information for deep analysis but it wasn’t so easy to make quick comparisons and to see how a state or country was progressing. This latest report connects to the same dataset but will let you see how the numbers have changed in the past three days across countries and states.

Click the following screen image to view the publish-to-web report. Just right-click a country to drill-through and view state/province three-day changes. The CDC and WHO provide state & province case data only for the United States, Canada and Australia.

I’ll update the GitHub repository and the template app with these additions as well.

Non-recovered cases are the number of confirmed cases less the number of recovered cases. The “Confirmed Cases” metric used in reports we see in most news programs and websites is the all-time accumulated total for a country or state. Attempts to report only the number of active cases has been inconsistent across geographies. This method to calculate the recovery rate seems most reliable at the country level but we don’t yet have consistent recovery numbers at the state and county level in the unified data set.

Roadtrip, Climbing Case Numbers and Public Perception

Having this information at our fingertips makes a huge difference. My wife and I are currently on an unplanned road trip attending to some urgent family business. In light of the outbreak, we are driving about 3,500 miles rather than flying. Driving through Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico; it is apparent that the situation is perceived very differently in different areas. For example, the Navajo reservation is observing curfew and no one is allowed to be outside their homes under penalty of law. In New Mexico, absolutely everyone must wear a mask to go into a store. But in other places where we have traveled in the past two days, it is life as usual with little or no restrictions – even though the number of confirmed cases has risen by about fifteen percentage points in the past three days. Here in New Mexico, cases have increased by about 28% so we will be wearing our masks and cautiously practicing social distancing.