With any epidemic, data is vitally important. It allows you to identify where the problem is occurring so that you can focus resources, trace contacts, and get ahead of the contagion. For all of us individually, data is also important so that we can understand out individual risk. Below are some data sources that we have found to be most up to date and accurate regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.
COVID-19 Data by Country and State
World Health Organization – Daily reports on country totals that most people are using as their sources for data.
Johns Hopkins University – great map and up to date information on countries and states in the US and states/provinces/region in other countries.
The New York Times has a page dedicated to tracking COVID-19
COVID-19 Death Rate by Country and State
The New York Times has a great chart showing the deaths over time by state, which demonstrates that the rate of increase of fatalities varies by location – between doubling every day to doubling every 10 days.
COVID-19 Data by County
New York Times – Updates throughout the day on US state totals and US county totals.
How Do These Data Sources Compare?
Analysis and comparison of data sources is being conducted by Our World in Data.
COVID-19 – Calculating Total Cases and Projecting Cases Based on Known Data
Tomas Pueyo has put together the analysis that everyone is citing for calculating the total cases based on known data and in another paper he projects cases based the approaches being taken on his post on Medium.
COVID-19 and Violence
Epidemics have been historically linked to violence — with either epidemic violence making communities more susceptible to other epidemic diseases or epidemic diseases making communities more susceptible to epidemic violence. This was seen most recently in Africa with the spread of Ebola with the violent conflict. We are anticpating that there could be increases in violence as the COVID-19 disease spread, including community violence, domestic violence, self harm, and other forms of violence. We are actively monitoring violence levels and developing strategies to respond.
COVID-19 and Hate/Racism
We have already seen some increases in hate speech and racism, in particular hate directed towards Asian and Jewish people. We are actively monitoring this trend on social media and in traditional media reports and are developing strategies with our partners.