I started by trying to find reliable current data for provinces in the public web pages of each provincial public health organization. And got puzzled and frustrated. So I wrote some stuff, and kept poking around...
May 31: Toronto Star story leads me to the best site yet for Ontario Covidata. And from academia, whence one would expect it.
After a month of looking, this UofT Dalla Lana Medical School effort is the best site I have found for aggregating and normalizing COVID-19 data in Canada. Read 'About the data' for the details on how and why of the data.
Over time, lots of dashboards and other visualizaion tools showed up, this is one that I like except it does not do per capita cases when you compare provinces. Compare Ontario cases with Yukon for a quick demo of lack of useful info.
Test, test, test. This ourworldindata.org effort is the best site I have found for aggregating global testing data, and they do embeddable charts.
Johns Hopkins University tracker is really good. When they are not being interfered with by politicians,the American can do good stuff.
Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) maintains a timeline of case counts and interventions. It is way behind but best one of these I have found in Canada.
The Oxford COVID Government response tracker dataset records what actions govts took on what days. I will add some GUI for this for Canada in the near future.
Throughout the pandemic, there has been doubt as to the accuracy of the numbers.
Cases are undercounted, for lack of testing or people not reporting they
have COVID-19 or health systems just not coping with the numbers or having inadequate reporting
systems or governments simply not reporting accurate numbers. Deaths are thus also guaranteed to be
undercounted, for all the same reasons, and differing protocols to report deaths: is it a COVID death
if an infected person dies, and has COVID, but the virus is not definitively the cause of death?
The Guardian reported on an
study that uses excess deaths as a measure of the true cost in lives.
UPDATE: May 5, 2022. The WHO published a news item
and report on excess deaths, estimating about three times the officially reported mortality.
My look at public data offered up by the feds and some provinces.
NB: April 7, 2022: The official numbers for the provinces cannot be trusted to truly represent the case counts in their
jurisdictions. Provinces have deliberately curtailed PCR testing (or any relevant test and count, and test and trace,
and masking and other basic public health measure) and seem to be leaving the assessment of real case counts to
ad hoc wastewater testing, with gives an approximation of reality. Without rigourous surveillance testing of a significant
portion of the population daily, the data is suspect, the health units are adrift and the public health policies are based
on unicorns. Ontario, for instance, has dropped vax passports and mask mandates, leaving risk assessment to the individual,
but is not providing reliable data on which to base that assessment. I will shut down reporting Ontario daily
data in the near future, as it increasingly is fake news.
We are governed by fools, but it has been ever thus.
World-wide summary shows data based on some multilateral groupings
Delta world-wide summary shows current data vs 7 days ago based on some multilateral groupings
Delta China provincial summary shows current data vs 7 days
from the errata.csv: 7/3/2020,time_series_covid19_confirmed_global.csv,United Kingdom,2/3-7/2/2020,,,Correction according to the official reports
UK correction is mentioned here
From 2 July 2020, Pillar 2 data has been reported separately by all 4 Nations.
Pillar 2 data for England has had duplicate tests for the same person removed by PHE
from 2 July 2020. This means that the cumulative total number of UK lab-confirmed
cases is now around 30,000 lower than reported on 1 July 2020. Information about the
different pillars is available on GOV.UK.
The author has ignored other corrections, but this one was so noticeable in graphs it had to be fixed. The correction in number of cases pushes the death per case rate higher for the UK, something they did not need to do.
The UK results on August 18 showed that about 5000 deaths had been rolled back. British exceptionlism at its most exceptional. I redid the data for this statistically-challenged backwater.
The WHO declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on Jan 31. What did your government and public health system do, immediately upon reading the situation report?
The Emergency Committee on the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) under the International Health Regulations (IHR 2005) was reconvened on 30 January. WHO declared the outbreak to be a public health emergency of international concern. The Emergency Committee has provided advice to WHO, to the People's Republic of China, to all countries, and to the global community, on measures to control this outbreak. The Committee believes that it is still possible to interrupt virus spread, provided that countries put in place strong measures to detect disease early, isolate and treat cases, trace contacts, and promote social distancing measures commensurate with the risk. More details can be found here and in Annex to this situation report.
[emphasis added - Ed.]
The WHO declared a pandemic on March 11. What did your government and public health system do, immediately upon reading the situation report?
WHO Director-General in his regular media briefing today stated that WHO has been assessing this outbreak around the clock and we are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction. WHO therefore have made the assessment that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic.
[emphasis added - Ed.]
The WHO laid out general steps in the Director General's media briefing March 11. What did your government do in response to the following advice from the DG?
Let me summarize it in four key areas.
First, prepare and be ready.
Second, detect, protect and treat.
Third, reduce transmission.
Fourth, innovate and learn.
I remind all countries that we are calling on you to activate and scale up your emergency response mechanisms;
Communicate with your people about the risks and how they can protect themselves - this is everybody's business;
Find, isolate, test and treat every case and trace every contact;
Ready your hospitals;
Protect and train your health workers.
And let's all look out for each other, because we need each other.
All of the WHO's COVID-2019 situation reports (sitreps) are here
There has been much criticism of the WHO's responses and alleged pandering to pandas. The Guardian presents a timeline of the events. The WHO is caught between a rock and a White House, but, could have been more strident earlier. In the post-pandemic, whenever that is, a thorough investigation and rug-sweeping-under by all and sundry will occur.
Rules for holding the virus in check are simple, but so darned hard to follow.
Notes about our sad, broken data and testing.
but it is not all bad news, the data has improved daily as time has gone on.
People have taken the trouble to disseminate lies during the pandemic. One of those efforts is here.
actual photo of the virus
worst variant of the virus
Xi could have done a better job of alerting the world. The Chinese government knew in early December there was a problem.
This is a common issue with all governments. They either knowingly lie to us, or they just don't have the data, so they lie to us. In all cases, assume they lie to us.
Unfortunately the CPC lying, obscuring and misdirecting was to the detriment of the entire global community.
Any visitor is welcome to mail the covid master