Almost a month and I have been seeing patients with moderate to severe COVID-19 infection. This virus can do so many tricks on your body, and we are still learning about them. Medications to fight this infection are still lacking (meaning that the real heroes are our nurses, PT/OT/RT specialists, hospitalists, intensivists, palliative care teams, and others).
I believe the lack of effective therapy has pushed the conversation into prevention strategies, including social distancing to decrease the impact of unabated transmission in our communities. With this in mind, epidemiological data has been one of the main subjects of discussion. The Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 dashboard has become the standard visualization reference for many, as seen on the news and social media. I found myself interested in creating one for the state of Wisconsin, by using the information released by The New York Times it its Github repository (it covers all the United States territories), and the Wisconsin Department of Health Services county data. Crossing these two databases in Tableau, I created a dashboard to visualize the situation in Wisconsin. The New York Times data contains date of reporting, which allows queries by date. I am currently updating the dashboard every 1-2 days, with the assistance of a bash script to download both tables (I’m thinking about adding the bash script to a cron job). The result can be viewed here.
