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Show HN: Log-Scale Covid-19 Plots

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Re: Show HN: Log-Scale Covid-19 Plots

#21

Post by dguest »

jaakl wrote: post #4
hedora wrote: post #3

Very cool. I’d love to see the same plots scaled by population.

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’…

I guess it depends on what you want to do. If you're trying to make sense of a given countries response, (cases) / (population of administrative region) seems like a decent metric. Also since policy tends to follow administrative lines it's a decent (but extremely noisy) metric to see what policies are working.

What do you want to learn from (cases) / (people in infected area)? The denominator seems difficult to define since it's not scale invariant. If you defined an "infected area" as being within 1 km of an infected person, for example, you'd get a very different answer from if you defined infected area as 10 km from an infected person.

In the limiting cases where you define infected area with very fine or very course granularity, you get an infection rate of 1.

Re: Show HN: Log-Scale Covid-19 Plots

#22

Post by s1t5 »

If you look at the last few "confirmed" plots, all the lines are in the bottom left corner but the x-axis still goes to above 70 (I guess for the sake of consistency) - this means that most of the space on the screen isn't used and it makes it very difficult to make out anything from the lines.

And when you need to recreate the same plot with diffirent subsets of the data like you've done here, that's a great use case for an interactive dashboard which allows the user to select the countries/regions and also zoom in and out.

Re: Show HN: Log-Scale Covid-19 Plots

#25

Post by mrb »

gmuslera wrote: post #10

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 prev…

I agree! Cumulative charts are less useful. For my charts, I represent new cases or new deaths per day. It shows such a clear picture of the trend of the growth:

https://mobile.twitter.com/zorinaq/status/124578701743622144...

Re: Show HN: Log-Scale Covid-19 Plots

#26

Post by alkonaut »

Suggestion: use fixed style for the same label across multiple graphs. If a country is blue+dashed in the cases plot it should be the same style in the deaths plot. Use a style from the label hash or a global table or something.

Re: Show HN: Log-Scale Covid-19 Plots

#27

Post by sdfjkl »

Well done, log scale, rebased to common starting point - the best way of depicting international comparisons so far.

Zeit.de has an interactive version of these (in German), which adds a rectangle for "days since numbers last doubled", a good indicator of how severe the situation in a country is.

Scroll down past the map to the third graph with international data, click on "Todesfälle" (deaths): https://www.zeit.de/wissen/gesundheit/coronavirus-echtzeit-k...

Re: Show HN: Log-Scale Covid-19 Plots

#28

Post by dragonwriter »

sdfjkl wrote: post #27

Well done, log scale, rebased to common starting point - the best way of depicting international comparisons so far. Zeit.de has an interactive version of these (in German), which adds a rectangle for "days since numbers last doubled", a good indicator of how severe the situation in a country is. Scroll down past the map to the third graph with international data, click on "Todesfälle" (deaths): https://www.zeit.de/w…

> Well done, log scale, rebased to common starting point - the best way of depicting international comparisons so far.

Yeah, its what the Financial Times and many others have been using for quite a while, log graphs with a starting point of the Xth death or Yth case. Its a standard way of presenting this kind of data.

Re: Show HN: Log-Scale Covid-19 Plots

#30

Post by jansan »

mrb wrote: post #25
gmuslera wrote: post #10

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 prev…

I agree! Cumulative charts are less useful. For my charts, I represent new cases or new deaths per day. It shows such a clear picture of the trend of the growth: https://mobile.twitter.com/zorinaq/status/124578701743622144...

Do you have these charts for the main countries? From your chart it looks like Italy and Spain have reached the peak, US is still growing, Germany may be just about to peak. But it is hard to read.
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