“Shelter in place” mandates are starting to appear in cities all around the United States. Some people may be wondering why we are starting to take such drastic measures, and the reason is a complete fail from the government to get us prepared for the oncoming outbreak. While countries like South Korea have been rigorously testing daily since February, the United States is still slow to ramp up our testing capacity. I wanted to explore how far behind we are on the curve.
You can see the interactive dashboard here: https://www.vivianpeng.com/covidtesting
Data was pulled from US and South Korea CDC pages between February 8 and March 15. For the US data, I used Python and BeautifulSoup to scrape the data from HTML tables. For the South Korea information, data was manually inputed from the press release pages. The press release format differed each day, so was unable to use a web scraper.
This visualization was last updated on March 15, 2020. Web scraping was done in Python here and visual was made in D3.js here
As of March 15, the US had only tested 0.00097% of its total population. With all the efforts to shelter in, how do we know if we are "flattening the curve" when we don't know the true value of the curve?
This visualization was last updated on March 15, 2020. Data source is from The COVID Tracking Project, and visual was made with R Shiny here
I would like to update my code to pull the data automatically daily, so the dashboard will be updated. I would also like to include information and resources for WHERE to get testing in your state/region. If you would like to collaborate on this project, please get in touch!