Spotting the difference

The idea of the Covid19 Dashboard, at http://www.anywhereanytime.io/covid19 with its myriad graphs, tables, and maps, is to be able to discern trends, spot anomalies, and overall give a clear picture of 'what's happening'

So how well does it do that?   We have a test case at the moment--California and Texas are each said to be "exploding" in terms of New Confirmed Cases.   How do we see that on the Dashboard?

Below are two pictures--the first is of the graphs in the lower left-hand corner of Page 1 (the counties maps for USA states), when California and Texas are both selected.   Clearly in the left-most graph, the cases are skyrocketing!   Aha...a solid indication of what the national news is proclaiming
But changing the time-scale is less satisfying, as are the logarithmic plots.

The second is of the county-by-county maps of the two states, shown for the last five months, and then breaking that into the first four months and the past four weeks.   If the past four weeks are 'skyrocketing' you might think that the maps would show that.   And, to be sure, you can find minor differences in each of the maps, but nothing there would cause you to 'catch your breath'

Kinda gives you pause for thought?

It certainly should give evidence of why we insist on 'so many viewpoints'      I could show many examples where a different metric, graph, table, or map illustrates a key difference--but for this instance, there is one outstanding graph to convey the dramatic changes in America at the moment