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Day 6 – March 22, 2020
I don't like posting incomplete data, so stick a huge asterisk next to this… because there was no BC update today, so the Canada number is incomplete. Nevertheless, the other numbers are accurate, so here it is… and with tomorrow's update I will back-fill what's missing from today's and we'll see where we're at.
Hope you all got out for a bit of outside social distancing! Because most of the rest of the week is miserable rain, and for once — Vancouver rain — if that's going to stop people from clustering outside on the White Rock pier or the basketball courts at Kits beach… good.
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Day 5 – March 21, 2020
To put it in very Canadian terms, what you want to see on the graph is for it to not "hockey stick" up to the right. So far… we're good. I keep saying the same thing, but seeing numbers grow isn't bad; it's expected. And linear growth flattening out is the best-case scenario. Exponential growth is what's bad, and as numbers grow, we'll have a better sense. The next several days will tell a lot.
In the meantime, I hope everyone had a really nice day of social-distancing outside in the sun… which means hang out outside, alone or with the people closest to you, ie the people you live with. And stay away from everybody else!
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Day 4 – March 20, 2020
We’re still at relatively low numbers, tracking pretty closely to where the US was 10 days ago. It’s a continual rolling 10-day window to see how effective our efforts have been. It’d be really nice to see that red line detach from the blue one and continue straight across with no upswing and it’d also be very nice for our neighbours to the South to see their line flattening out.
The colour coding on the rightmost two columns of numbers signifies change from the previous day. The growth factor is a comparison between today’s new cases vs. yesterday’s. The column to its right is the percentage increase of cases nationwide. Green is good, because it implies a smaller increase than the previous day. A streak of green days in a row would be very nice to see.
Needless to say, especially this early in the game, these numbers are very susceptible to how many tests are being administered and who’s being tested. As time goes on and numbers get bigger and the data is more generalized, it’ll all mean more and be clearer. The localized clusters we’ve witnessed (especially in B.C.) are not indicative of the entire country. If we based our assumptions entirely on what’s unfortunately happened at the Lynn Valley Care Center, we’d be appropriately far more worried.
Shoutout out to Dr. Bonnie Henry and Adrian Dix, whose 3pm updates are not just informative but also reassuring. And to the sign-language guy… if we are all as passionate in treating this as seriously as that guy is with the way he conveys the message, there’s no doubt we’ll be ok.
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Day 3 – March 19, 2020
I added a couple of rows and columns of interest. Mark Twain said something like "Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics". Indeed, there are many ways to paint different pictures with the same colours. This simple chart has grown in complexity and I've received a lot of comments and some criticism from people.
To be clear, and I'm not a statistician… I was curious how Canada's response, at this critical time, looks compared to three other cases… Awful, Bad, Bad-then-good. It's still early to tell, and I have my opinion… but pictures are worth more than words, so here you go.
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Day 2 – March 18, 2020
Follow-up to yesterday’s post… and I will try to update this daily, around 5pm. To make it consistent, I’ve normalized the numbers for that. The data comes from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
The individual Canada chart looks a little curvier than it did yesterday, but that’s only because I added a bit of earlier data and while the trend was indeed increasing, the historical numbers are small. Check the y-axis, not just the pattern.
Also, while yesterday saw an increase of 157 cases nationally, that number was lower (129) today, according to this source of data. And that’s what it’s all about… slowing the growth, because it will grow for the foreseeable future. The question is how fast.
I’ve also added South Korea as an example of how it looks when you do things right; that is the trend everybody wants to see. Still growing, but way slower than before.
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