The Federal Procurement Data System tracks federal contracts of $10,000 or more. For ProPublica, Moiz Syed and Derek Willis made the data for coronavirus-related contracts more accessible with a searchable database. Browse the items, the companies, and the amounts. Somehow it seems like so much, and yet so not enough.
See also the accompanying article highlighting some of the more questionable contracts.
The coronavirus has changed everything. Larry Buchanan, for The New York Times, goes minimalist with a series of up and down arrows to show which direction things moved.
Even though there’s no magnitude or axes, it still works. In some ways, the simplistic view is more effective than regular charts.
This map by Tim Meko for The Washington Post uses time series lines to show change in confirmed cases by county. Using a combination of line thickness, height, and color, the map highlights the counties with the greatest change since early May.
Hairy.
For Reuters, Manas Sharma and Simon Scarr animated a coronavirus outbreak in Singapore between January and April, going with the force-directed bubble view. It starts small, then there’s the spread, and clusters form.
A Yahoo News/YouGov poll recently showed this:
Only 40% of American adults are like, “No way. This is false.” But then there are 32% who are like, “Well… maybe? I don’t know.” Then there are over a quarter who are like, “Yeah, he’s trying to track us.”
Really? Please tell me there is some study that shows internet-based polls are crazy. My brain is having trouble processing these results.
The New York Times used their full front page to list 1,000 names of the 100,000 who died due to the virus. There is an online version, which is equally moving.
This is The New York Times front page for Sunday, May 24, 2020.
Using anonymized cellphone data from SafeGraph, Reade Levinson and Chris Canipe for Reuters mapped the change in foot traffic for different types of businesses over time.
Orange represents more movements since the first week of March. Blue means less. Yellow means about the same. We’re working towards all orange. Fingers crossed.
Sidenote: Now isn’t really the time, but when it is, we’re gonna have to come back to this mobile data stuff. Clearly it has its uses, but with so many offerings, there’s bound to be a less than useful leak.
With coronavirus testing, many governments have used the percentage of tests that came back positive over time to gauge progress and decide whether or not it’s time to reopen. To calculate percentage, they divide confirmed cases by total tests. The denominator — total tests — often comes from the CDC, which apparently hasn’t done a good job calculating that denominator, because not all tests are the same.
Alexis C. Madrigal and Robinson Meyer for The Atlantic:
Mixing the two tests makes it much harder to understand the meaning of positive tests, and it clouds important information about the U.S. response to the pandemic, Jha said. “The viral testing is to understand how many people are getting infected, while antibody testing is like looking in the rearview mirror. The two tests are totally different signals,” he told us. By combining the two types of results, the CDC has made them both “uninterpretable,” he said.
Oh.
