Naked Data

All the data you can eat

My Corona

Don't Miss, My Corona

Have 19 out of 20 Covid cases gone undetected?

Official stats record just over 650 000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in South Africa, but the question epidemiologists around the world are struggling to answer is how many cases have there been that we don't know about? Discovery Health boss Ryan Noach has crunched some numbers and come up with a...

a week ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Counting Covid-19 cash and contracts

Over at Mail & Guardian, the data team is keeping tabs on dodgy dealings in Covid-19 contracts and calling on the crowd to help. Most provinces have now published reports for spending on PPE (which the revenue services says has been "open day" for cheats), but the reports leave much to be des...

4 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Cash for graphs

The inestimable Mediahack must have set some kind of record for crowdsourcing in South Africa. Within a day and a half of asking people to support its popular SA Coronavirus Dashboard (views two million and counting), it exceeded its target of R30K to cover some of the costs of this labour of lov...

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Going nowhere fast

News that Zambia has just opened its borders to travellers who can produce a recent negative Covid-19 test certificate made us want to find more information about which other countries are loosening up international restrictions. And as this updated map from Kayak shows, the answer is "not many"....

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Counting Covid

The Covid-19 news from South Africa this week has been bleak: over a quarter of tests now come back positive, and the country has the fourth highest number of daily new infections in the world. The two bright spots of news we're hanging on to is that there are far more tests being carried out her...

2 months ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Six ways to classify coronavirus

How are different countries coping with the lifting of lockdown regulations? The Guardian has an interesting take on it, crossreferencing daily infections with restriction rates in the 45 countries with more than 25 000 cases. It's come up with six ways to categorise progress, from Relaxing and R...

2 months ago

Finally, My Corona

Pike County on how to improve your Corona numbers

Turn your county's bad news into good news with this simple little trick: invert the Y-axis, and your Corona-cases magically drop instead of increase. https://twitter.com/sydneyboles/status/1270411871674384384 Pike County as since turned its graph the right way around, but not before some excelle...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

No room for isolation

How do you self-isolate when your home is a single room shared with three other people? Live Mint posits the question in India, where 42% of people live in exactly those conditions, which are just right for the spread of coronavirus. The site digs into the feasibility of government advice, and "p...

3 months ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

A plea for common corona-reporting standards

As someone who literally started crying when the Western Cape started introducing spaces as a thousand separator in its daily coronavirus updates, I truly sympathise with this one. Our World In Data, a collaboration between Oxford University and the Global Data Change Lab, has published a set of ...

3 months ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Dead CV scrolls

The New York Times' visualisation of mortality rate increases throughout the years is quite something. It picks out countries, cities and states from around the world who are experiencing more deaths than normal right now, and compares them to events throughout history. From natural disasters suc...

3 months ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

NHS gives its data away to some dodgy orgs

The Coronavirus has given the NHS the excuse to give its data to private firms to play with. One firm that is helping them -- out of the goodness of its black heart -- is Palantir, the CIA-funded group that helped Trump steal an election, used data to sniff out illegal immigrants for ICE, and did...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

A shiny new Covid-19 data portal for Latin America

The new Covid-19 Observatory for the Containment of Covid-19 in the Americas isn't your normal coronavirus dashboard. There's no R values or logarithmic expressions of death rates here. Rather, this project from Miami University is looking at the state of public policy and the movement of people ...

3 months ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Silver linings

Lockdowns are lifting, but if the long term prognosis for coronavirus-related regulations and restrictions has you feeling down, maybe Happy Data can offer a pick-me-up. It's a project which aims to collect data around positive outcomes of the covid crisis, like an increase in volunteering and a ...

3 months ago

My Corona, Nerds

Are face masks invisible to algorithms?

The compulsory wearing of facemasks outside your home might be a deeply uncomfortable experience, but at least it's putting a stop to all those insidious facial recognition technologies privacy nuts have been banging on about for years, right? Not so, reckons Karan Bhanot, who's been playing arou...

3 months ago

The source of Kenya’s Covid-19: Not China

You'll be surprised to discover (or at least I was) that the majority of Kenya's Corona-cases didn't originate in China. Only two in five imported infections came from Asia at all, Odipo Dev reports. The biggest source of imported Coronavirus cases? The United Arab Emirates, accounting for nearly...

Jason Norwood-Young

3 months ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Simulating our way out of Covid-19

Of the Coronavirus explorables, this is by far my favourite. On the one hand, it does what many of the other simulators do -- gives you a curved graph that we're all becoming very familiar with. But it takes this so much further, simulating the effects of increased hygiene, social distancing, tra...

Jason Norwood-Young

4 months ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Plandumbic

ProPublica investigative journalist Marshall Allen speaks to both the Plandemic filmmaker Mikki Willis and interviewee Judy Mikovits for their comments, because that's what a journalist does.

Jason Norwood-Young

4 months ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

It was the salmon mousse. And the canapes. And the sausage rolls

Japanese broadcaster NHK has put together a little visual aid showing why large gatherings are a bad idea when there's coronavirus around: at a mock buffet, one diner has fluorescent paint squirted on his palm. During the meal a blacklight is turned on to show just where that paint has spread... ...

4 months ago

Finally, My Corona

130m litres of beer to get rid of? Challenge accepted

There's no let up to the anguish on South African Facebook and WhatsApp as middle-class pantries and wine racks run bare of booze, yet will the government listen to their plight? They will not. Prohibition remains in place, and as a result the brewery formerly known as SAB (now AB Inbev) says it ...

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4 months ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Explaining the Coronavirus chart to your kids (and parents)

You may think your logarithmic Corona-chart that starts at 100 infections makes perfect sense, but go show it to your mom and see how she interprets it. Or, send her this video from Vox. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-3Mlj3MQ_Q

Jason Norwood-Young

4 months ago