title: "Coronavirus: 2020-2-17"
date: "2020-02-17"
layout: pageCopy

Disclaimer

Like I said before, I’m just a completely unqualified person trying to track some coronavirus numbers, so take anything said here with a grain of salt.

Redefinition

Today, the World Health Organization switched to China’s standard of reporting confirmed cases as including clinical diagnosis, so I will likewise stop reporting the “lab-tested” measures. Instead of the old active_narrow, the new “narrower” measure will consist of the “confirmed” (including clinical) minus the dead and recovered. I’ll simply call this active. The measure which includes suspected cases I will call active_plus.

Where I previously had WHO data versus data that included Chinese clinical diagnoses, there is now basically one stream of data on confirmed cases. China won. The only big discrepancy now is that the “spike” of clinical cases introduced into the data occurs on February 12th in the Chinese data and February 17th in the WHO data. I am going to follow the Chinese “spike” because it places the cases closer to when they were actually diagnosed. Ideally, we will eventually learn exactly on what days the “extra” cases occurred, so I can correct the graphs accordingly.^[1]

Instead of using the lists lab_tested and broad_tested, which contained data drawn at various times from multiple data sources, today I redid all my data on the principle that WHO data is preferred whenever it exists, except for its treatment of lab-tested cases in the brief periods from February 12th to February 16th. Where WHO data is not available, I am filling in my lists with data from outbreak.cc.

So here’s my little program as it now exists:

{% highlight ruby %} """A little coronavirus exercise.""" import matplotlib.pyplot as plt def quick_dirty_graph(y, caption): """Make a quick, dirty graph from some list with a caption.""" x = [] for i in range(len(y)): x.append(i) plt.bar(x, y, label=caption) plt.legend() plt.show() def delta_list(data): """Show how a list changes from index to index.""" x = [] for i in range(1, len(data)): x.append(data[i] - data[i-1]) return x def percent_changes(data): """Show how a list changes from index to index, as a percentage.""" x = [] for i in range(1, len(data)): x.append((100 * (data[i] - data[i-1]) / data[i-1])) return x """Where possible, data is from WHO situation reports. For January 22 and February 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16th, numbers were taken on February 17th from outbreak.cc.""" confirmed = [282, 314, 580, 581, 846, 1320, 2014, 2798, 4593, 6065, 7818, 9826, 11953, 14557, 17391, 20630, 24554, 28276, 31481, 34886, 37558, 40554, 43103, 60326, 64442, 67100, 69197, 71329, 71429] """Data on suspected cases was available from WHO situation reports for January 25 and 27th through 31st, inclusive. For all other days, the data was taken from outbreak.cc's tracking on February 17.""" suspected = [54, 136, 393, 1072, 1965, 1965, 2684, 5794, 6973, 9239, 12167, 15238, 17988, 19544, 21558, 23214, 23260, 24702, 26539, 27657, 28942, 23598, 21675, 16067, 13435, 10109, 8969, 8228, 7264] """All recovery data taken from outbreak.cc; not available in WHO situation reports.""" recovered = [25, 28, 28, 34, 38, 49, 51, 60, 104, 125, 175, 255, 341, 489, 648, 912, 1175, 1563, 2075, 2675, 3324, 4039, 4783, 5988, 6944, 8192, 9434, 10973, 12712] """All death statistics taken from WHO situation reports except January 22, which was obtained at outbreak.cc on February 17th.""" dead = [6, 6, 9, 17, 25, 41, 56, 80, 106, 132, 170, 213, 259, 304, 361, 425, 492, 565, 638, 724, 813, 910, 1018, 1115, 1369, 1383, 1526, 1669, 1775] """Cases outside China, as defined by the WHO to include Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. For January 22, a comparison of WHO January 21 and 23 numbers, along with the outbreak.cc number for cases outside mainland China indicates that 6 or 7 persons outside China had the virus. Accordingly a guess of 6.5 was entered.""" outsiders = [4, 5, 6.5, 7, 11, 23, 29, 37, 56, 68, 82, 106, 132, 146, 153, 159, 191, 216, 270, 288, 309, 319, 395, 441, 447, 505, 526, 683, 794]