While I have been navigating these difficult times, I’ve found some obvious challenges as well as some moderately intractable ones. Adjusting to working from my home while remaining connected with the rest of our team has been an adjustment, perhaps even challenging, but the effort has been pretty linear. We’ve got a great team, devoted to providing the best each of us can deliver to a client, and they’re doing an amazing job.
Things like that are easy. But, at the end of the day, I’m a software engineer, and I like to see decisions based on boolean conditions derived from data. That data has been hard to see. The national news talks of the curve flattening, and of New York being past its peak, and of the rest of the country still coming up the curve, and of outbreaks in towns with meat packing plants or prisons, and of retirement communities being decimated by the virus. It’s difficult to approach our situation from an analytical point of view with only these anecdotes.
I’m not sure if this is by design or not. The CDC is conspicuously absent, and the news media seems to want to pitch our current situation in a “panicked liberals” vs. “freedom-loving, fear nothing” conservatives. Maybe that’s a great story, but our behavior in Colorado needs to be far more colored by what’s happening in Colorado, and less based on the national average. The problem is that its difficult to find the full daily picture. The best coverage I’ve found is at the Colorado Sun, and it’s limited to right now. You can’t see the curve.
So, I found a public API for statistics, and I wrote a quick graph to demonstrate the important (as I see them) statistics on a day-by-day basis. Hopefully, this will help you see the “curve” that we are trying to flatten.
Northern Colorado COVID-19 Visualizer
Data from COVID-19 Data Repository by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.
Implementation created by Radial Development Group, LLC.
This tool is provided as is, and is only as good as the underlying statistics. Stay safe.
This graph is something that anyone who likes it can feel free to embed in their own website. It should be relatively flexible in terms of size, and it doesn’t require any kind of validation about where it’s running. We added some information to it about the source of the implementation and the data to the embeddable object. Feel free to use the code below to go ahead and add it to your page, if you would like.
Embed the graph in your site
The current version of the element is not particularly responsive, and works fine in a 900x700 iframe. A moderately good coder can make it fit in other dimensions.
We will update this in the coming days with code that will allow a responsive display. Check back soon. In the meantime.
<iframe id="jobu" height="700" width="900" allowfullscreen="" src="https://radialdevgroup.com/covid/"></iframe>
If you have questions about this, please feel free to drop an email to me at marketing@radialdevgroup.com. An upcoming version of the object will include all Colorado counties, and we can make the object flexible if you want it to run in another state. Johns Hopkins has done an amazing job of building a flexible API with lots of data for locations all over the world.
Stay safe out there.