A New Way to Track the Movement of the Virus Across the Country
I’ve been a working data journalist for more than 10 years and I still haven’t discovered a clear way to explain what that means. The best answer I’ve landed on is that I’m “interviewing datasets”: Asking them questions, in the form of searches and queries, the same way that we interview an expert by posing specific questions to narrow down the vast database of her expertise.
For six months now, many of us on the Numbers Beat have been living with one primary source: the daily number of new reported COVID-19 infections and attendant deaths in every part of the world, which an intrepid team at Johns Hopkins University collates from dozens of sources every day. The topline news will always be the latest figures on the scope of the pandemic—the equivalent of the data’s answer to the question “how much do you weigh today?”—as well as where the virus is most insurgent or on the decline.
Even this snapshot is a tremendous amount of information to digest. For TIME’s daily COVID-19 dashboard, after deliberate consideration we chose three maps, three charts and two tables to cover the daily picture, which includes historical data for every country and U.S. state.
One thing I’ve noticed in writing the code to parse these data is that the story of coronavirus in the U.S. closely resembles the asymmetric crawl of COVID-19 across the rest of the world. In the U.S., it has struck different states months apart with widely varying severity; globally, the same is true; just replace “states” with “countries.” Some nations have responded much more quickly and effectively than others, though that isn’t always the end of the crisis. In some cases, like Spain, the virus is dangerously resurgent after an initially successful flattening.
We’ve seen this same staggered timeline in the U.S., which isn’t surprising. By design, the U.S. resembles 50 nation-states duct-taped together. The epidemic was never going to strike the country in a united way, and the response, hazily divided between the federal and state governments, was never going to be equal across the board.
I’ve wanted to concisely capture this phenomenon for a while. Interviewing the numbers is only the first half of data journalism; the second is figuring out the most compelling and arresting means of telling their story with a combination of words and images or interactive visualizations. My first attempt, about a month ago, was a time-lapse map of the volume of daily cases by state or county since the beginning of March. But with dozens of locations lighting up in different parts of the map as time progressed, with no obvious pattern, it failed to present a coherent picture.
Looking at this geographic kaleidoscope, I recalled a map I’d seen on the Web site of the University of Virginia Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service about a year ago, which charts the mean center of U.S. population from 1790 to the present and how it might continue moving west through 2040:
As you can see, this is not a map of where people have lived, but of a weighted average showing the “center of the population”—the equivalent of the center of mass in physics—even if those center points are not in highly populated regions. (The geographic center of the lower-48 states is in Lebanon, Kansas, population 202.) Could a similar central point be calculated for new daily cases of COVID-19 for each day since the virus began to spread, drawing a path of its progress similar to the one above?
For this experiment, I calculated the median center of the infected population, which is very similar to the mean but much easier to explain: It’s the point where 50% of cases are to the west and 50% to the east, and where 50% of cases are to the north and 50% to the south.
There’s a magical moment in computing when, after hours of writing and debugging code, you see the first visualization of your work. As soon as I saw the path of median points that COVID-19 cut as it rose and fell in different locations, I felt that it told a compelling story of how the pandemic has unfolded domestically. (The color in this image represents time, from yellow in late February to blue in the present.)
This is not a continuous path of infection from one point of origin, but rather the track of where cases were evenly split in the middle of the compass. The first confirmed cases in the U.S. were in Washington state in late January, but a separate introduction in the densely populated New York City metro area in March very rapidly tugged the center all the way across the country.
What I like about this map, which you can view in rapid animation on TIME.com is that it shows how the South and Southwest were not nearly as direly affected by the virus until after New York had stabilized and state governments everywhere, encouraged by President Trump, were cautiously reopening their economies.
That hasty mistake may, in retrospect, have been a function of the natural inclination to compare oneself to other regions at the same point in time, just as it’s easy the forget, when gazing at the night sky, that one is not seeing the stars as they are now but as they were years, decades, centuries or millennia ago. Though in this case, now that I think about it, the effect is in reverse. In early April, when New York was at peak crisis, states like South Carolina, Florida, Arizona and Texas were witnessing not what used to be, but what was to come.
—Chris Wilson
OVER THE WEEKEND
The world passed 25 million cases
Earlier today, the global tally of confirmed cases broke the 25 million mark. After a brief plateau of daily cases in early August, the global trend has started to slope upwards again. In fact, the peak average daily count was set on Friday:
That’s been driven at least in part by the recent spikes in Western Europe, but perhaps more importantly by the worsening crisis in India, the world’s second-most populous country. India has surpassed 3.5 million cases and the pandemic shows no sign of abating there. Since Thursday, it has continued to post daily tallies of around 80,000 cases, with some early reports suggesting that today might have been the worst day yet.
And in the U.S., massive spikes in the midwest have stalled what was a steady decline in daily cases nationally. Iowa, Kansas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Indiana have all recorded their highest single-day numbers in the last week.
California made headlines today by becoming the first U.S. state to cross 700,000 total cases—but that’s a bit misleading, given that California has by far the most residents of any state, at some 37.7 million, it has about 10 million more people than Texas, the second-most populous. On a per-capita basis (that is, cases per 100,000 people), California is middle of the pack, at around 1,750. Louisiana, by comparison has recorded over 3,150 cases per 100,000 people.
The Tour de France kicked off its first leg
Usually, the first day of cycling’s biggest annual event ends with riders passing by thick crowds of jubilant spectators lining the sides of the finishing straight in Nice, a coastal city in southern France. Yesterday, however, the crowds were sparse and the vibe was subdued, reports the Associated Press. This is arguably the biggest global sporting event to occur in the pandemic era, and comes at a somewhat awkward time, as France is struggling to contain a second major spike in cases. Last week, the country reported it’s second highest daily count, following only a major spike back in April.
The Tour will try to use a sort of roving bubble to attempt to keep COVID-19 from spreading through the participants and their teams. All cyclists and staff first had to pass two coronavirus tests, and they will all be tested again on Sept. 7 and 14, the two rest days. Riders will also have daily health checks. A cyclist who tests positive will be sent home; if two or more cyclists or staff on the same team test positive within a week, the entire team will be forced to drop out. The plan is for the Tour to end on Sept. 20, in Paris—assuming the situation in France doesn’t spiral out of control.
Many other sports continue to struggle to get through planned events. In Major League Baseball, the Oakland Athletics and Houston Astros cancelled a game planned for today after Oakland announced a confirmed COVID-19 case within their organization. The Indian Premier League, the world’s top cricket league, made public the fact that two players and 11 team personnel have tested positive; the 2020 season is currently planned to get underway on Sept. 19. And the organization that manages the tennis U.S. Open—which is set to start tomorrow—issued a statement earlier today saying that an unnamed player has tested positive and has been withdrawn from the tournament.
College-campus outbreaks kept building up
As more and more college students return to campus for the fall semester, campus outbreaks are becoming increasingly common. The University of Alabama on Friday stated that over 1,000 students have tested positive for COVID-19 since in-person classes started on Aug. 19. The chancellor of the U.A. school system has not suggested the possibility of closing down the campus, but did note that students can choose to take any of their classes online. Yesterday, CNN reported yesterday that there have been outbreaks at four Kansas State University sororities , with a total of 22 confirmed cases. And earlier today, New York governor Andrew Cuomo announced SUNY Oneonta will close its campus after more than 100 people there tested positive.
While many colleges have decided to move to online-only classes for the foreseeable future—some, like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, reversing an earlier decision after seeing an early campus outbreak—many more have not made that hard choice. Last week, the New York Times published the results of a survey of over 1,500 U.S. colleges and universities, and found that over half had reported at least one COVID-19 case, with some 26,000 confirmed cases overall on campuses. Since that time, many more colleges have begun in-person classes, including some of the nation’s largest, such as The Ohio State University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Central Florida, among others.
A Shiite community held a drive-in commemoration of the holiday day of Ashoura
Shiite Muslims on Saturday observed the holy day of Ashoura, typically commemorated with large, communal mourning events. This year, all around the world, Shiite Muslims had to adapt to the ongoing pandemic, the Associated Press reports:
In Iraq, the country’s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, encouraged people to stay home and watch online or televised commemorations.
In Lebanon, both the militant group Hezbollah and the Amal movement of Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, urged Shiite Muslims there to do the same.
In Pakistan, foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi spoke publicly, asking people to adhere to social distancing rules.
In Long Island, New York, a group of Shiite Muslims from a few different communities organized a sort of drive-in commemoration, where families could park their car in a large lot, and watch sermons, poetry recitals and more on large screens set up there.
—Elijah Wolfson
All numbers unless otherwise specified are from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, and are accurate as of August 30, 1 a.m. eastern time. To see larger, interactive versions of these maps and charts, click here.
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Today's newsletter was written by Chris Wilson and Elijah Wolfson
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