Update: December 13, 2020 (and from time to time since then, I update links if I notice they are broken)

This post is getting a surprising amount of attention. I don’t normally update posts, but I am updating this one since it is getting attention and the commentary in the original post is significantly outdated. Rest assured, if you are a historian in the far future studying what I was thinking back in June 2020, I have kept the original post at the bottom. I am keeping all the links, just grouping them somewhat and removing (from this section) the outdated commentary. (Thank you, Word Press, for making a simple copy-and-paste operation like this beyond excruciating.)

Data Trackers

• Johns Hopkins – map, stats, access to data sets
• New York Times – a national (U.S.) map by county and plots by state (now, with a paywall! as of 7/30/21. Which I will never pay because WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION!)
• Financial Times – similar to others, but they look at excess deaths a little differently and have some interesting graphics
• BBC – similar to NYT, but international
• CDC – changed this link to their “COVID-19 by County” page on 2/26/22; the updated recommendation is to mask indoors if new cases in your county are 200,000 per 100,000 population per week, AND if the number of people entering the hospital and/or in the hospital is above certain thresholds. It’s a little hard to find the data and figure out yourself, so if you trust the CDC (and who wouldn’t?) you can just type in your county and they will tell you if it is high/medium/low.
• https://coronavirus.thebaselab.com/ – a variety of maps and plots
• City Observatory – intermittent data-based articles and maps
• Our World in Data – excellent interactive country-level data, maps, and plots. A tip – you can also type in “world” or the name of a continent in the country box.
• https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/ – a very clever animated time series of growth in cases over time, by country
• Reuters – just more numbers and maps, similar to NYT
• Covid Act Now – state-level data and communication in a simple, easy to understand index format
• Harvard Global Health Institute COVID Risk Levels Dashboard – similar to Covid Act Now, but less simple and less easy to understand. Seems to have more ability to drill down into county-level data, although when you do that much of it is blank.
• Wastewater surveillance from “Biobot Analytics” – added 4/30/22.

Simulations

• University of Washington IHME – the best place I have found for understandable future projections. At the state level.
• FiveThirtyEight – compares different models (no longer updating as of 7/30/21)
• https://covid19risk.biosci.gatech.edu/ – This site calculates the probability that someone in a group of a given size is infected, based on the estimated rate of active cases in a U.S. state.
• MicroCOVID – a risk calculator based on local data and allowing you to adjust your risk tolerance and try out various scenarios (added 8/8/21), such as “one night stand with a random person” (on the latter, please remember there are other diseases besides just Covid-19, for example antibiotic-resistant syphilis…)
• Covid-19 Forecast hub – another visualization of various models and ensembles of models

Vaccine Trackers

• Vaccine Allocation Dashboard – looks nice but no data for my state as I write this on December 13, 2020.
• Our World in Data now has a vaccine page (added January 17, 2021).

Local Pennsylvania/Philadelphia Interest

• The state of Pennsylvania has a useful dashboard which they have now made public (or it was public before and I didn’t notice.) It compares cases, positive tests, and hospital data for the current and last 7-day period, at the county level.
• Speaking of Philadelphia, a shout out to the Philadelphia Health Department which provides some open downloadable data.

Miscellaneous Stuff

• I look at the FAO food price index on occasion. Sometimes I look at oil and gold prices, and how many Special Drawing Rights can be bought with one U.S. dollar (these are junky sites, please beware). I like the Real-time Sahm Rule Recession Indicator. Oh and, the Rapture Index is at an all time high!

Original Post (June 27, 2020)

I decided to list out and summarize the variety of trackers and simulations I’ve mentioned in previous posts. Like many people (in the U.S. Northeast at least), I was glued to coronavirus info on various screens from roughly mid-March to mid-May, then my attention started to gradually drift to other things as the situation got better. Now, it seems that it has either stabilized at a not-quite-out-of-the-woods level, or is slowly reversing itself as we see other parts of the country start to be affected more seriously (sorry if you are reading this and are being affected, we in the Northeast take no pleasure in your suffering, I promise, although we suggest you turn out any bigoted anti-science politicians in your area who are letting this happen.) Anyway, I find that I am interested in starting to look at trackers and simulations again on a daily basis. These are in the order I discovered them.

• Johns Hopkins – a neat map early on, although now the entire world has become a blob. Still a good place to stare at data.
• New York Times – a national (U.S.) map by county and plots by state. seems to load even though I have used all my free articles for the month.
• BBC – they update continuously but I’m not sure if this link will be to the latest
• CDC – this is what I would have predicted would be the go-to source of information and expertise if you asked me before all this started…but it’s mediocre at best. Yes, that just about sums it up.
• https://coronavirus.thebaselab.com/ – a variety of maps and plots to stare at, not my first stop but a little different if I am tired of others
• University of Washington IHME – still the most informative state-level simulations I have found, accounting for hospital capacity among other things
• City Observatory – they did an awesome analysis by U.S. metro area, which I have not seen anyone else do (human beings interact with each other socially and economically in cities and their suburbs, which often cut across states, and states often contain metro areas that are not connected much socially or economically. Economists, social scientists and urban planners know this of course, but nobody else studying the epidemic seems to have figured this out. Seriously, other data visualization and simulation sites, you can do this, it’s just a matter of grouping data by counties.) Unfortunately, they quit updating it and have not automated it. I still check every now and then to see if they have picked it up.
• Our World in Data – pretty much every conceivable way of looking at data by country. I like to look at confirmed deaths per million across countries. By this measure, the starkest contrast is east vs. west. The eastern countries were hit first, hard, and without warning, and their death rates are very, very low. They have a variety of government types, responses, ethnicities and cultures. I just don’t think anybody has come close to explaining it. The U.S. is in the middle of the pack of western countries, which somewhat contradicts conventional wisdom and suggests news organizations are making the obvious error of not normalizing by population.
• https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/ – an animated time series of new confirmed cases in the past week vs. total confirmed cases, both on a log scale, by country. As I write this, shows the beginning of a concerning uptick for the United States, and Brazil out of control.
• Reuters – I actually never wrote about this one, but it has a map and some numbers.
• FiveThirtyEight – they have an aggregation of various simulation models out there. New York and New Jersey look like a stream sprayed horizontally out of a garden hose, while Texas and Florida (today) look more like a fire hose.
• https://covid19risk.biosci.gatech.edu/ – This site calculates the probability that someone in a group of a given size is infected, based on the estimated rate of active cases in a U.S. state. I assume it’s estimated active cases, anyway, or it wouldn’t make sense. It would be better by metro area (seriously guys, someone just get this done), but still a nice idea. I’m in Philadelphia, but I figure the New Jersey numbers are probably the most applicable.
• Covid Act Now – provides a composite risk index at the state level, and county when county level data is available in the right format (which is not that often)
• Harvard Global Health Institute COVID Risk Levels Dashboard – keeps it simple with just data on new cases, but gives you a variety of nice mapping, charting, and tabular formats to slice and dice the data at country, (U.S.) state or county level.
• The state of Pennsylvania has a useful dashboard which they have now made public (or it was public before and I didn’t notice.) It compares cases, positive tests, and hospital data for the current and last 7-day period, at the county level.
• Speaking of Philadelphia, a shout out to the Philadelphia Health Department which provides some open downloadable data.
• I look at the FAO food price index on occasion. It’s falling lately. Sometimes I look at oil and gold prices, and how many Special Drawing Rights can be bought with one U.S. dollar. Oh and, the Rapture Index is at an all time high!