Scale of one million deaths

The United States is about to reach one million confirmed Covid deaths, or already passed the mark if you consider excess deaths. There’s no way to truly feel that number, but Axios visualized the scale, with comparisons against city populations and historical events.

A diamond shape represents counts, and as you scroll, shapes fill the screen until you only see the tips. The shapes overflow beyond what we can or want to understand. The time series line on the bottom shows cumulative deaths over time, leading towards the one-million mark.

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Lessons learned from making covid dashboards

For Nature, Lynne Peeples spoke to the people behind many of the popular covid dashboards and the lessons learned:

Among the shared themes for the dashboards were simplicity and clarity. Whether you are producing visuals and analytical tools for policymakers or for the public, Blauer says, the same rules of thumb apply. “Don’t overcomplicate your visualization, make the conclusions as clear as possible, and speak in the most basic of plain-language terms,” she says.

Yet, as other data scientists point out, presenting data simply might not be enough to ensure viewers get the message. For one thing, attention to detail matters. Ritchie recalls how she and her team spent hours focused on the titles and subtitles of charts, “because that is ultimately what most people will look at”. And in those titles and subtitles, the analysts made sure to specify ‘confirmed’ deaths or ‘confirmed’ cases. “An emphasis on ‘confirmed’ is really important because we know that it’s an underestimate of the total,” says Ritchie. “It might seem very basic, but it’s really crucial to how you understand the data and the scale of the pandemic.”

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Potential coronavirus mutations

For NYT Opinion, researchers Sarah Cobey, Jesse Bloom, and Tyler Starr, along with NYT graphics editor Nathaniel Lash, discuss the potential mutations for the coronavirus. The accompanying graphic zooms in on the amino acids that allow the virus infect human cells. Scroll to see the mutations in the Delta variant and Omicron, and then keep going to see where else we might be headed.

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Partisan excess deaths

Excess deaths is the difference between expected deaths based on historical data and actual total deaths. It’s an estimate for how many people really died from covid. For Axios, Will Chase and Caitlin Owens charted excess deaths for Republican-leaning states compared against Democratic-leaning states, between March 2020 and March 2022.

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Increasing mortality baseline

There was a time not that long ago when a hundred covid deaths seemed like a lot, but now the United States is getting closer to one million deaths with over a thousand deaths per day. The country is unmasking and re-opening. For The Atlantic, Ed Yong discusses the shifting baseline and our perception of these big numbers:

The United States reported more deaths from COVID-19 last Friday than deaths from Hurricane Katrina, more on any two recent weekdays than deaths during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, more last month than deaths from flu in a bad season, and more in two years than deaths from HIV during the four decades of the AIDS epidemic. At least 953,000 Americans have died from COVID, and the true toll is likely even higher because many deaths went uncounted. COVID is now the third leading cause of death in the U.S., after only heart disease and cancer, which are both catchall terms for many distinct diseases. The sheer scale of the tragedy strains the moral imagination. On May 24, 2020, as the United States passed 100,000 recorded deaths, The New York Times filled its front page with the names of the dead, describing their loss as “incalculable.” Now the nation hurtles toward a milestone of 1 million. What is 10 times incalculable?

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Percentage breakdowns of pandemic life

To broadly show how people have lived in the U.S. during these past two years, The Washington Post shows percentages for various questions, such as “Have you had long covid?” and “Did you work from home?” But instead of using something like pie charts, they used people icons in illustrated unit charts.

In the above, each person represents a percentage point. There’s also a multiple-choice element to the piece, which helps readers relate personally, but I think it’s mostly there as a way to reveal the full answer breakdowns.

Projects like this one always remind me of World of 100.

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Stat-driven view on how American conservatives shifted against vaccine

As we know by now, conservatives in the U.S. are more commonly against getting vaccinated for Covid, but it wasn’t always like that. Vox shows how ideas shifted to get to where we are now.

The 1990s elementary school aesthetic with markers and overhead projector slides works well here. The choices guide you step-by-step through the data points.

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Questioning Novak Djokovic’s Covid tests, based on data

Tennis player Novak Djokovic is not vaccinated against the coronavirus, and as a result, was not allowed to compete in the Australian Open. Data collated by the BBC suggests that Djokovic lied about his Covid-19 test results in an attempt to get around rules:

The confirmation codes in all cases slotted into the same chronological timeline as our initial batch sent by BBC colleagues and showed that the earlier the test result date, the lower the confirmation code.

The only outlier of all the confirmation codes we’ve plotted was Mr Djokovic’s positive test on 16 December.

See also Zerforschung’s questioning from earlier this month.

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How N95 masks work

In efforts to reduce further spread of the virus, the US is set to distribute millions of free N95 masks across the country. Aaron Steckelberg and Bonnie Berkowitz for The Washington Post illustrated how the masks work.

Early in the pandemic, N95 masks were hard to get. My wife, who is a healthcare worker, described how she and her colleagues would have to reuse N95 masks and store them in paper bags hanging on the wall. It’s good to see so many N95s on their way to households now.

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Death rates by vaccination booster status

Our World in Data continues their important work on providing and showing up-to-date Covid data. Most recently, they updated death rates in Switzerland by vaccination plus booster status. The rates for the unvaccinated are expectedly much higher, but also the rates for those with a booster are multiples lower than those fully vaccinated with no booster.

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