Early in the coronavirus outbreak, I found myself following daily numbers as they began coming out of China. At the time, I was working my way through a textbook on Python 3, and when I discovered that some of the graphs I would have liked to have seen didn't exist, I started making them. This turned into a project lasting about five weeks, beginning February 16th, in which I made graphs in Python 3 to let myself look at things like raw numbers of cases, rates of spread, active vs. confirmed vs. suspected cases, breakdowns by country and region, and logarithmic graphs that enabled the reader to peer into the dynamics of how the virus did and sometimes didn't follow an exponential graph.

I continued this until March 22, the day before my own state of Ohio shut down all non-essential business. If you look at Google Trends, I began my daily updates just about the moment that coronavirus first began to explode into public consciousness, and ended at the very peak of search interest in the subject. It went from being a sort of foreign-news curiosity to being on the verge of shutting down the country in those five weeks. It also happened over those five weeks that various websites began doing some really excellent work providing graphs of the data, which began to make some of my work on it redundant.

Still, I thought I might keep the pages around as a sort of day-by-day journal of how one non-expert news reader processed an astonishing, once-in-a-century pandemic. If you find taking a peek at that interesting at all, take a look. It can also serve as a very basic introduction to spinning up simple graphs in Python 3.