What are the best web pages to get the big picture to know how the pandemic is playing out in your area and across the entire world? We’ve explored the trackers and below are our top picks. We may add more to this page at a later time. If you have a favorite virus tracker that is not listed, leave a comment with a link.
- Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Dashboard. Breakdowns by country. World map. World totals. Graphs. There is a mirror at ARCGIS.com. The sources of the data for this dashboard may also be worth a visit: the WHO, the CDC, the ECDPC in Europe, the NHC in China, NCovDXY, 1point3achres, worldometers, BNONews, and the COVID tracking project.
- The Kaiser Family Foundation, KFF.org has similar data but also a nice chart of the curves in different countries.
- The CDC Tracker has data for the USA that lists probable as well as confirmed cases. They also have demographic data, although it was of questionable use when the largest group ethnically is those for whom ethnicity is unknown.
- The World Health Organization dashboard has an overview. An interesting feature is collection of charts showing the numbers the WHO could get each day from countries as a graph over time. There are some days when the number would be down to zero, then back up the next day, an artifact of the reporting process, no doubt.
- The New York Times tracking page is useful. The graph at the top of the NYT page today seems to show the USA has peaked, in agreement with the WHO confirmed cases for the USA (which we assume subtracts when people recover). These are in contrast to the CDC tracker and the KFF tracker pages today which show a continuing upward climb in the USA.
Google has a tracker, but the data comes from Wikipedia, which gets data from several sources including the Johns Hopkins site the WHO and different sources from different countries.
- BNONews has put a huge amount of work into their site and there are some useful perspectives there. For one, a graph that shows the number of cases in the USA currently by state.
True Strange News has an embedded tracker from one of the primary sources, BNO news on our home page if you just want a quick overview, but any of the above dashboard have useful windows on the situation as we try to plan for an uncertain future.
While not a tracker, Medium.com has an article with a graph showing mutations as the virus has hit different places. Click to view the full sized image on that site.
The kinds of graphs we’d most like to see do not exist as far as we know: what people tried as alternative treatments when they became aware of being sick, what the hospitals tried that might be different from the norm, the differences in genetics between those who make it and those who die, and genetic and other differences that result in faster recovery times. It is the strain of the virus that makes a case mile or not? How much of the difference in symptoms is due to differences in people’s immune systems?
