Show HN: Log-Scale Covid-19 Plots

This repo replicates log-scale plots seen in the Financial Times and other news sources, here grouped by world region. Plots are updated nightly and visible on the repo's homepage.

I tried, it does not work that way if you think. Or at least your “population” spec should be not arbitrary current administrative region or country, but specific virus spread area, which is very difficult to get data. You’ll get weird absolute numbers for EU minicountries (San Marino and Luxembourg are top) and very different figures per China, Hubei and other regions there. And if you finally compare in graphs you’ll have same graph anyway.

Nice use of matplotlib. I'd like to apply this to US states as well.

Although even between states the variation in test rate is so great that it's hard to gather much from it.

I personally use hospitalizations as a more accurate metric of total infections in the US. For example, Washington is being hailed as doing a great job to slow the virus down, but ~80% of the confirmed tests result in hospitalizations, because they still just don't test you otherwise [0]. Compare that with a more realistic hospitalization rate (many states with a lot of cases are around 10% -- who would have guessed it would be Louisiana and Florida doing the broad testing?)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2020_coronavir...

http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/ has normalized graphs.

Why all graphs are cummulative instead of new cases for that day? It's harder to notice how it is growing that way (i.e. more or less new cases than the previous days) and harder to see if it is going exponential, lineal or whatever. And, of course, forces to use log scales because the accumulated number is already high.

At least for networking graphs is more meaningful to see difference from the actual from the previous commulative total, than watching the total for a network interface.

Another, at least for me, misleading use of graphs is to show the cummulative total people that ever got sick, instead of the current amount of sick people (taking out the recovered, and maybe the dead ones).

I know that how the measurements are done in most places is rigged, as not everyone is checked, and there are a lot of people that are asymptomatic, but that happens with both the new cases and the cummulative ones. Showing the cummulative numbers don't take out that rigging.