Frequently asked questions
Frequently asked questions
I started making plots of the CSSE data for my own purposes, to understand the progression of the pandemic and put the news in context. Then I started sharing plots with friends. Eventually I wanted a way to publish the results where anyone could see them.
I haven't seen any other site that is plotting the CSSE data, so here you are.
The selected states are either important to me or my friends, or are past or current hotspots. Ditto for the selected countries. GA and TX are included because they clearly reopened too soon and I want to see whether consequences appear in the data 2-3 weeks later.
The data comes from the COVID-19 Dashboard at the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University. They were the first group to publish comprehensive data for countries and states with a regular update frequency. They publish the data to github for all to use. It is updated after 4pm ET each day; these plots automatically update by approximately 6pm ET for US data and a few hours later for international data.
The plots are entirely produced in Google Sheets. I use the IMPORTDATA to ingest the data from github in CSV format, then the QUERY functions to pull out specific state and country data.
Different jurisdictions have different artifacts in their data. For example, there are clearly 1-week cycles in some jurisdictions. Some jurisdictions report fewer cases on weekends and "extra" cases on Monday and Tuesday, for example. That's why most plots contain a 7-day moving average line to try to show the trend more clearly.
The stars indicate the approximate date that the jurisdiction began to reopen their economy. This is a very fuzzy concept so don't read too much into it.
Each country's plots begin on the day of that country's first reported case in the CSSE data. The CSSE data begins on January 23; a handful of Asian countries already had single-digit cases by then.