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Medicine Stats

New Map Tries to Track Progress In Curbing the Spread of COVID-19 (bibbase.org) 26

Microsoft recently added a COVID-19 tracking map at Bing.com. But they're not the only ones visualizing data on infection rates...

Founded in 2008, BibBase offers a free web service that lets scientists create a page of their publications that can then be embedded into other web sites. Now long-time Slashdot moglito describes BibBase's newest project: Slashdot readers might be interested in a tool that we at BibBase.org have created for tracking the evolution of COVID-19 in different countries and regions. It is based on the same data the Johns Hopkins map uses, but allows tracking individual regions (to the degree the data is up to date).

[Disclaimer: Most of us aren't data-vetting scientists. Consider the below just one possible grass-roots interpretation of the data.]

Using this web app it is for instance possible to see that some countries have been able to break the exponential growth in cases. This preselection for instance shows China, South Korea, Norway, and Italy on a log-scale. It is visible from this that after China, also South Korea has been able to curb the spread, and now Norway is showing signs of that as well. In contrast, Italy still seems nowhere near the turning point.

We hope that this tool can help people as well as decision makers understand the relative effectiveness of the approaches used by these countries to curb the spread. We believe it also shows the importance of testing (which has been very good in South Korea). More importantly perhaps to readers, we feel that this is a sign of hope that it is possible to get this under control and that everyone should feel motivated to abide by the strict self distancing we are all trying to enforce.

Signs of hope seem rare these days, so we wanted to share this.

The BibBase blog has more information, noting that "the current data set seems to be missing data from the U.S. until just recently, which reflects in unreasonably abrupt increases in the charts for the U.S. and its states."
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New Map Tries to Track Progress In Curbing the Spread of COVID-19

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  • Does it keep track of people showing signs of Corona Discharge ?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • by Faw ( 33935 ) on Sunday March 15, 2020 @04:41PM (#59833168)

    Use the John Hopkins one [arcgis.com] instead.

    • "Not fully configured"? :(

    • A friend recently told me to try the John Hopkins one. I find it looks exactly like the WHO version (https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/685d0ace521648f8a5beeeee1b9125cd) , but just in dark. WorldOMeter selection of statistics are very informative: https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info] To see how much impact awaits us, i recommended comparing the country you are interested in with: China - where the numbers have not largely flatlined (number of cases is not growing significantly in comparison to closed cas
  • Worldometer (Score:5, Insightful)

    by aaarrrgggh ( 9205 ) on Sunday March 15, 2020 @04:56PM (#59833204)

    Personally I am a fan of worldometer [worldometers.info], as they have a lot of daily trends for various countries. But it isn’t healthy to keep obsessing over this crap...

  • by DrLudicrous ( 607375 ) on Sunday March 15, 2020 @05:09PM (#59833248) Homepage
    Norway still looks exponential to me, as do all the other Western nations. Straight lines mean exponential growth. Decidedly concave down curves indicate getting things under control.
    • by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Note that over the course of this graph we in Norway have switched testing strategy multiple times:

      1) Testing all those in contact with an infected
      2) Testing all that show signs of infection
      3) Testing only critical personnel and the hospitalized

      If you're currently in home quarantine and don't need hospitalization you're not tested. That'll make our numbers look better but doesn't mean much in reality. Our numbers look pretty bad pretty fast but that's probably because in the beginning they were fairly compl

  • there is no reference to the size of the population nor to the density of the population area....

    these are POINTLESS

    dont forget to buy pasta...

    John Jones

  • I think Indonesia is going to be a coronavirus death bomb. Indonesia has 274 million people with 57% of those living on the island of Java. There's inadequate testing, with grossly inadequate medical facilities if there is a big outbreak, and a government intent on keeping quiet about any bad news in order to keep their tourist industry going.

    Bring out your dead.

    • by _merlin ( 160982 )

      Indonesia's already started to lock down places where the virus has appeared. Solo City (near Yogyakarta) is locked down - no movement in/out, no large gatherings, limited non-essential movement. They might not be talking about it, but they're taking measures to reduce spread.

  • https://hgis.uw.edu/virus/ [uw.edu]

    I think one of the real bad things about to explode are the refuge camps in Turkey, Greece and other places where the Syrian war has pushed people to the limits. Others are in the remote regions of Africa and the sums of, well anywhere, but Brazil, Thailand, Africa etc. For those poor people who are living under repressive governments - this is going to be bad.

    As for the EU, well, they could have been working on a plan on how to handle this. They appear to be paying more attention

  • So far, you simply cannot read anything from infection rate graphs as far as I can tell - because hardly anyone, anywhere has been tested.

    Even South Korea, supposedly the king of testing, has only tested a small percentage [twitter.com] of the population. That chart shows that as of March 12th, they had tested 3692 people PER MILLION citizens. That's around 4% of the population. So they could easily be missing vast swaths of infection depending on where and when they were even testing.

    So how can you really know if in

    • by znrt ( 2424692 )

      So far, you simply cannot read anything from infection rate graphs as far as I can tell - because hardly anyone, anywhere has been tested.

      nobody said those are infection rates. these are just aggregates of known cases as reported by institutions/media in quite different contexts (no necessarily tested), those are obviously underestimates and probably have even errors for several reasons, but that's still the best there is. it doesn't tell the actual rate of spread but does show the gravity.

      I'm sure this initial plan is flawed in several ways, but I throw it out there to get people thinking, and to shed a light on how to think about the numbers being presented to all of us as fact.

      the flaw is that there isn't any systematic testing anywhere, not even in south corea. testing figures are shady for most countries. there is no unified t

      • it doesn't tell the actual rate of spread but does show the gravity.

        What I am saying, is that it does not show the gravity, especially of which country has the worst problem.

        The death rates do show that, to some extent. But the known case rates and the testing numbers cover such a small percentage of the population anywhere it is being done, that numbers In on place that look similar to another could easily be hiding a 2x difference or more of contraction even if all of the tests worked identically.

        That's

        • by znrt ( 2424692 )

          it doesn't tell the actual rate of spread but does show the gravity.

          What I am saying, is that it does not show the gravity, especially of which country has the worst problem.

          The death rates do show that, to some extent.

          yes i assumed death cases, critical cases and recoveries to be considered as well. it's still fuzzy data though because of different contexts. e.g., turns out italy has the highest proportion of people over 70 of the eu. also, if some focus hits a nursery home for elderly or a hospital with people with preexisting conditions (as has happened) this will skew the numbers considerably too. so to be taken with a grain of salt. however, over time these oddities will be less relevant. if we assume that the data i

    • by Whibla ( 210729 )

      Random sample testing in international hubs / major cities over the last couple of months would have been a sensible policy for any government. You would not have needed to do that many for statistical significance either.

      Obviously there would have been, and are, challenges to this idea, but it would have resulted in a much clearer picture on both a national and international scale.

      Ah well, another missed opportunity, but then eagle eye hindsight is easy, prediction, especially of the future, is much harder

  • So it provides total of cases per country, in USA it also provides totals per state. Unless it provides actual __location__ of cases, or clusters of cases within let's say 10 miles - then this "map" is no different from textual and completely non-graphical tables available elsewhere, such as on Wikipedia.
    • Not to mention, the graph suggests that the dots in each state are proportional, but are not. West Virginia, which has no reported cases (according to the graph) has a larger dot than neighboring Kentucky (20) and Washington DC (10). They also missed Virginia completely.

  • It's a cute visualization that was clearly plagiarized from JHU. But it doesn't really matter.

    For the vast, vast majority of people who get this bug, it will be indistinguishable from the seasonal flu. In fact it has probably been spreading like wildfire since November and simply mistaken for it. For the US at least, if it was in China in November, it was here in November.

    It's more serious for the elderly for sure, but so was SARS and H1N1 and we didn't have nearly this extreme a response. This betrays the

    • by epine ( 68316 )

      For the US at least, if it was in China in November, it was here in November.

      I'm trying to figure out if this is transporternomics or replicatornomics. Either way it involves a Tricorder in the image of a fancy salt shaker.

      I guess I missed the international epidemiological conference on The Nature of Being Hereness.

    • It's much more serious than "a mild flu." It's definitely not an old person disease as younger people have died from it as well (although children seem to be fairing well so far). Some people who recover also have lung scaring and reduced life-long lung capacity, so survival rate is not by itself a good measure of the affect of the disease.
  • People SHOULD be getting worked up over the Chinese Wuhan virus, because China created/released it in an attempt to SHUT DOWN the freedom protesters. When was the last time you heard anything about them eh? It worked as designed, but, or on purpose, they released it about the same time as many Chinese nationals were traveling to China, for their holiday. Then by the time they flowed back to the rest of the world, word gets out that there is a virus in China. By that time, those Chinese nationals across th
  • If I learned anything from playing Plague, Inc, those two bastards are the toughest to infect. Once your virus starts having visible symptoms, those two are usually the first to close their ports!

  • Nice job, but the graph would be slightly easier to interpret if, when you checked a country, that row of the table were colored to match the line they plotted for that country.

    • Great suggestion! Sorry for the delay. This is implemented now. We've actually already added it a few days ago and I had meant to respond earlier but forgot.

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