COVID-19 Pandemic Data

This plague is producing huge amounts of data.

The question we all ask, is: “What is signal and what is noise”?

There are three main sources for worldwide country data:

  1. The World Health Organization

  2. Johns Hopkins University

  3. The European Center for Disease Control and Prevention (ECDC)

This analysis is a comparison of reults from the latter two sources.

And quess what? With a few minor exceptions, the results are very close indeed.

I picked Mali as an example to run the analysis.

The European source requires much more wrangling than the JHU dataset to get it into a tidy format. It also uses population data for 2018 ratner than 2020.

My conclusion is that I will stick wth the JHU source. Unless of course, the format is changed, there are no daily updates or other unknown unknowns appear.