How I track the coronavirus

UPDATED January 8, 2022

How can we best stay informed about the coronavirus/COVID-19 outbreak?

I’ve been tracking it carefully for weeks, and have built up an online search strategy.  I’d like to share a description of it here, partly in case it’s useful for readers, and also to request additions in case it’s missing anything.

I’ve broken these down into general categories by source, style, and openness.

Dashboards Information presented to give us a snapshot of the outbreak.

• The Johns Hopkins dashboard is the best designed one I’ve seen. It quickly gives you key stats (infections, nations, deaths, etc) in a very readable format. (Explanatory paper) They also have a new one combining state infections with state policies.  And a new one about school openings – K-12, I think.

• COVID Act Now, “America’s COVID Warning System,” displays data about the pandemic in the United States.
• Harvard, the Boston Children’s Hospital, and others offer a similar dashboard.

• The DIVOC-91 interactive visualization of the exponential spread of COVID-19 gives us many ways to slice data.
• A Coronavirus Data Explorer from Our World in Data.
• COVID-19 Comorbidity Dashboard (thanks to Steven Kaye)
• COVID Exit Strategy tracks individual American states and their responses.
• Information is Beautiful has a series of well designed visualizations. (Thanks to Tom Haymes)
• Dan’s COVID charts offer several good visualizations.
• COVID-19 projections from IMHE.
• Reuters’ global map has a nice animated timeline, showing the viral spread to date.  NBC New York also has an animation.
• Understanding the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic through data, from the World Bank. (thanks to Anne Boysen)
• The United States Census has a data hub and dashboard.
• Clinical Horizon has two dashboards: by country, by location.
• Very useful trajectory visualizations by Aatish Bhatia.
• Nextstrain offers updated genomic detail and visualizations.
• A video dashboard from South Korea.
• Social Distancing Scoreboard.
• Worldometers has a cleanly organized, extensively hyperlinked page.

• Tony Nickonchuk’s Global Deaths Due to Various Causes and COVID-19 offers a striking and very lucid visualization.
• The Economic Tracker is a dashboard for the pandemic’s economic results (thanks, Phil Long)

Academic dashboards Projects measuring college and university behavior:

• The Chronicle of Higher Education’s fall reopening plans tracker.
• Davidson College’s College Crisis Initiative dashboard.

Public research and preparedness Information from leading public-serving institutions.

• The World Health Organization (WHO) offers many resources, including a dashboard and situation reports.
• The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has a coronavirus page, plus a community profile report.
• The United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Protect Public Data Hub
• There are Wikipedia pages for coronavirus disease 2019 and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2.

Open source, open access research Materials produced by scholars that are freely and openly available without paywalls.

• Publishers’ open access sites: Elsevier, Springer, Wiley
• Science
• 1science’s links and records archive
• Rapid Reviews: COVID-19 is an open access overlay journal, aimed at assessing the quality of rapidly produced research.

Open news and analysis Content produced that’s not necessarily by academics, and is also freely and openly available without paywalls

• Global Voices – always good and underrated, accounts from people around the world.
• BBC News – coronavirus global topic.
• COVID Tracking.com – hosted by The Atlantic.

Paid content news and analysis Articles and other media behind paywalls.

• LitCovid: “a curated literature hub for tracking up-to-date scientific information about the 2019 novel Coronavirus.”
• New York Times: hub
• Washington Post: updates
• Financial Times: COVID-19 page

Social media Here I’m looking for the best sources, not hashtags or communities, although I’m open to the latter.

• Eric Feigl-Ding does a great job of gathering and analyzing news and data on the fly.
• Laurie Garrett: science writer and energetic Tweeter.
• Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization.
• COVID19Tracking.
• Nature‘s coronavirus blog.  Nature also has a podcast.

Online learning Educational materials about the outbreak in particular – i.e., not about disease or health care in general.

• WHO launched a class, Emerging respiratory viruses, including COVID-19: methods for detection, prevention, response and control.
• Futurelearn has a class, COVID-19: Tackling the Novel Coronavirus.

Libguides Curated resources produced by libraries:

• from New York University
• from Texas A&M
• from the University of Texas

Newletters The best in email.

• Sinocism is excellent for China in general.  Rich and including many Chinese language sources.

Prediction markets

• Good Judgement Open
• Metaculus

That’s all for now.  What do you think of these sources?  What should I add?  Are there good video and podcast resources?

If this is of value, I’ll keep adding to it as the outbreak continues.

(thanks to Jay Sieling, Sifu Dai, Esty, Bethany Bovard, Mike Sellers, Audrey Watters, Ruben Puentedura, and Ilene Frank for recommendations) 

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