My family had a cancellation decision to make for a holiday in Vietnam at the end of February through the beginning of March. The travel was to run through Seattle, South Korea, and Laos. I was also in training for the Boston Marathon on April 20th. These two situations caused me to take a strong interest in COVID-19 and I have been following the COVID-19 data closely, first in China, then beyond China, then in the US, and now in Newton.
The early stages of an epidemic follow simple exponential kinetics, which is common in microbial and mammalian cell culture, so I have been plotting the data to try to see where things were headed.
While there is plentiful data available on the internet on the virus progression across the globe, and complex models on how the growth can be slowed with distancing and other mitigations, there are few simple visualizations show where we have been and where we may be going in the near term. This site shares some frameworks to address that gap.
I have been using LinkedIn, FaceBook, and now this blog to share basic Excel graphs and extrapolations of the data, first to warn of how quickly the virus was progressing and now to show how it is being held back.
All views are my own and the analyses done on personal time. It is not associated with my employer, which is pursing therapies for this disease.
Jack Prior
covid19 at jackprior dot org