Wednesday April 29, 2020. Two and a half years ago, I posted my first blog post at http://innovascapes.blogspot.com/ about COVID-19, describing my personal experience with this pandemic that had, in truth, just begun. That struggle caused my to create the "InnovaScapes Institute Dashboard" with help from an old HP colleague, Scott Futryk.
For 2020, as the pandemic raged, I was religious about keeping the posts going--some 44 posts in 9 months. Many friends got a bit tired of the incessantly poor news, and as the vaccines began working in early 2021, I backed off--only posting five notes from January thru May. It has been quiescent since then, although I have created some analyses posted elsewhere.
You might recall that the early months were traumatizing. The outbreaks in Seattle nursing homes caused a panic that went nationwide about oldsters. Fully half the Confirmed Cases for folk over 80 resulted in death; meanwhile no one under 40 was more than a little sick. Quipsters in Texas (like the stupid Lt. Governor) said that the oldsters ought to "die for the Dow" rather than force lockdowns on "the rest of us." Soon we found that some clusters--e.g. prisons, nursing homes, meat packing houses, ski resorts, Las Vegas and Mardi Gras, and cruise ships--served as natural petri-dishes. College students elected to have "COVID parties" -- until some of those turned deadly.
As the lock-downs spread, so did anxiety, followed soon enough by backlash, and in our polarized society at the moment, by anti-vaxxers and 'end the lock-downs' rallies. Lest you think these were emblematic of a uniquely American bizarreness, these scenes played out in Western Europe, and are just now causing major unrest in China even.
The surprises kept coming. The first spike, noticed primarily on the Eastern Seaboard in terms of deaths (averaging 7 to 10 percent for infected folk in NYC, CT and parts of NJ), hardly registered anywhere else in America, except Los Angeles, the Bay Area and Seattle.
The second spike spared the East, but spread on a per capita basis all across the Midwest (PA, OH, MI, IL, for example). The third spike, by far the highest in terms of total cases, engulfed the whole country, surprising those rural areas that hitherto had ignored it (MT, SD, ND, ID, WY). Tracing how this all happened has been educational, to say the least.
Meanwhile, we kept collecting data:
So how about that--100 Million official US cases, two-thirds of a Billion cases worldwide. And thankfully, deaths are down by anywhere from 3 to 10x the rates at the beginning. So, we're 'sort of' out of the woods. Tell that to the families of the 1 Million dead Americans, though!
Today, Monday December 12, 2022, is to serve notice that we are suspending new updates for the dashboard. It will be active at https://anywhereanytime.us/covid19c, hopefully for years to come. It contains an immense amount of material. The daily updates were nearly 4,000,000 data elements, covering confirmed cases, deaths, both in absolute numbers and per capita for 3,143 US counties, 50 US States and D.C., and 196 nations.
It has several key features that are very difficult to find in other sources. A key feature is the date-range selector, which can be done for any county, state, or nation, or any collection of those. Another key feature is the geospatial choropleth map, giving incredible insight for otherwise obscure data in a table. https://datavizcatalogue.com/methods/choropleth.html
Three changes have reduced the desire for continuation of the accumulated data. First, USA Facts (our primary source for the three years) has become intermittent with some unfortunate data errors. Our back-up source, Johns Hopkins, has been great on States and Nations, but weak on history and on local counties and other county-like jurisdictions. Second, with vaccines now more prevalent, the initial fearsome death-rates have been reduced to the point that public interest has waned. Third, and maybe most important, the primary driver--confirmed cases--has become vastly under-stated with the advent of home test-kits. Finally, of course, our own time, effort and costs seem better placed elsewhere.
In some subsequent posts, I will provide some analysis of various key points that we've been able to recognize through this work. For example, the curious case of NO DEATHS in either Nebraska or Florida after mid-year 2021. Nebraska outlawed such deaths on May 8, 2021, and Florida's asinine governor agreed with such an idea on June 2, 2021. Nebraska stopped with 2,030 deaths, and Florida with 36, 973. USA Facts put up with this absurdity, but Johns Hopkins has persisted, and today lists Nebraska with an unofficial 4,672 and Florida with 83,201.
This is not to say that every death listed as COVID during the three years was correct, nor that all of the COVID-impacted deaths were included in other venues, but it is symbolic of our politically crazed times that these kinds of actions have taken place.
I don't want to disappoint those of you who have used this dashboard periodically--it will still be available, and maybe even to stimulate you a bit, I promise to complete the COVID-19 Diorama illustrated below in our AstroVirtual 'Control Center' in the near future.
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