Naked Data

All the data you can eat

My Corona

Don't Miss, My Corona

Tackling covid scams in Kenya

Never letting a good crisis go to waste, scammers are exploiting Covid-19 all over the planet, and nowhere is safe. Fortunately, journalists have risen to the occasion, with great work like Sophie Hill's My Little Crony piecing together links between politicians and PPE suppliers in the UK and th...

2 weeks ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Stale air: How the Coronavirus loves company (and closed rooms)

Some stunning visualisations by El País explain how likely aerosols are to spread the Coronavirus in enclosed spaces, like your home, a restaurant and a school. Irrespective of whether safe distances are maintained, if the six people spend four hours together talking loudly, without wearing a fac...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Can Google predict where Covid-19 will strike?

Dan Sinker has spotted a potentially important correlation in Google Trends data - Covid-19 outbreaks are accompanied by a proportional increase in the number of people searching for terms like "loss of taste". Seems obvious in hindsight, but The Washington Post has picked up the theme to look at...

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Republicans not so conservative with Corona

Dan Goodspeed has made one of those racing-bar-charts, this time showing Coronavirus infections per 100,000 by US state, and coloured by their voting partisanship. You can tell where this is going, but seeing the swathe of red still comes as a bit of a shock - of the 25 worst-affected states curr...

Jason Norwood-Young

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse

It's over a decade since Nick Davies pointed out that profitable news media was a short lived historical anomaly in Flat Earth News, but just how much further we had to fall was unclear until the coronavirus pandemic. The Tow Center and ICFJ have released a reported documenting just how bad thing...

a month ago

Don't Miss, My Corona

The day the Twitterati turned on Trump?

As Nathan Cunningham puts it, schadenfreude or support? Trump's Tweet that had contracted Covid-19 was his most liked ever. By a long way. https://twitter.com/nathcun/status/1312765224437645316

a month ago

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...

2 months 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...

3 months 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...

4 months 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"....

4 months 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...

4 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...

5 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

5 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...

5 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 ...

5 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...

5 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

5 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 ...

5 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 ...

6 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...

6 months ago