Fatalities from Covid-19 range from the hundreds of thousands to the millions. Nobody knows for sure. These predictions are based on statistical models, which are based on data, which aren’t consistent and reliable yet. FiveThirtyEight, whose bread and butter is models and forecasts, breaks down the challenges of making a model and why they haven’t provided any. Tags: coronavirus, FiveThirtyEight, modeling
The pressure of the coronavirus news cycle has gotten the better of some graphics designers. Via Twitter, Mark B sent me the following chart: I applied the self-sufficiency test to this pie chart. That's why you can't see the data which were also printed on the chart. The idea of self-sufficiency is to test how much work the visual elements of the graphic are doing to convey its message. Look...
On the surface, the decennial census seems straightforward. Count everyone in the country and you’re done. But the way we’ve done that has changed over the decades. The Pudding and Alec Barrett of TWO-N looked at the changes through the lens of questions asked: We looked at every question on every census from 1790 to 2020. The questions—over 600 in total—tell us a lot about the country’s priorities, norms, and...
3Blue1Brown goes into more of the math of SIR models — which drive many of the simulations you’ve seen so far — that assume people are susceptible, infectious, or recovered. Tags: 3Blue1Brown, coronavirus, epidemic, simulation
Another day, another Twitter user sent a sloppy chart featured on TV news. This CNN graphic comes from Hugo K. by way of Kevin T. And it's another opportunity to apply the self-sufficiency test. Like before, I removed the data printed on the graphic. In reading this chart, we like to know the number of U.S. reported cases of coronavirus relative to China, and Italy relative to the U.S. So,...
Maybe you're starting to run low. Here's how much you'll need when you go to restock. Read More
Comprehensive national data on Covid-19 has been hard to come by through government agencies. The New York Times released their own dataset and will be updating regularly: The tracking effort grew from a handful of Times correspondents to a large team of journalists that includes experts in data and graphics, staff news assistants and freelance reporters, as well as journalism students from Northwestern University, the University of Missouri and the...
