Novel Coronavirus & COVID-19: Data, Models, and Visualizations

This is not intended to be a complete analysis of the current pandemic. Rather, I just want a place to collect some particularly helpful articles and resources.

About the Models

Why It’s So Freaking Hard To Make A Good COVID-19 Model Creating a math model for something as complex as infectious disease is not easy, but COVID-19 is particularly difficult. Fivethirtyeight.com does a nice job of walking through many of the reasons that creating good models for it has been (and continues to be) so challenging.

Don’t Believe the COVID-19 Models -- That’s not what they’re for is The Atlantic's attempt to get people to understand the nature of modeling.

Data Visualizations

Coronavirus Infographic Datapack by Information Is Beautiful is my go-to spot for nice graphs. The first one uses a log scale, and is a great example of when and why log scales are so helpful for making sense of exponential phenomena. Basically, anything that looks like a line is experiencing exponential growth. The steeper the line, the faster the rate of exponential growth.

Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count is from the New York Times.

Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases at Johns Hopkins' Center for Systems Science and Engineering was the first tool I used to track the virus' spread. I still find it helpful for digging into geographic centers.