For the first 3 months of the outbreak I laboriously copied data by hand from Worldometers into an Excel spreadsheet and tried to identify interesting patterns to share with friends in Italy, Germany, the UK and US.

This was particularly useful in the early days as we could report how badly the UK and US were underestimating the impact that the virus would have on their populations, and later on we could see how effective lockdown measures proved to be in the countries that implemented them quickly and early.

Recently, my brother @dunstan pointed out that I could be far more effective using a data science toolset to publish a notebook using live data. He works for ObservableHQ and showed me how to get started on a self-service analytics page that friends and family could use to view maps :

Compare their country’s situation to another :

See if it’s safe to go outside 🙂

Or to get a complete overview of each region within a country of interest :

There are prettier and more sophisticated portals out there, but this is built on the same source data and is somewhat unique in that it provides access to regional data for all European and US regions in one place. Click the link below to see the page. You need to give it a few seconds to load…

Covid-19 Charts

I thoroughly enjoyed building this (I’m not a programmer) and can wholeheartedly recommend that you give ObservableHQ a look. You can fork my notebook if you want something to play with.