Talk:COVID-19 pandemic in the United States

Daily charts are broken

The daily case/death charts, x axis, is now labelled only with months. But the labels such as April and May do not correspond to April 1, May 1, etc. This can be easily seen by looking at the charts from a few days ago, which had day-of-month numbers. 67.169.166.36 (talk) 09:40, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

Recovered cases in the United States

Hi, I would like to ask why there is a difference in the number of recovered patients in the United States between the one from the bar graph and the other from the epidemology overview chart. --User:42.60.88.59 Revision as of 15:58, 15 June 2020

Statistics and weekly periodicity?

The plots showing the number of new COVID-19 cases and the number of deaths show a fairly clear periodicity with a ~7 day period. If there is a reason for this, I think mentioning it in the article would be useful. Is it something to do with when people get tested and their weekly schedule? When they are more likely to interact with others (e.g. on weekends) or something else?

Daily new cases as percentage of tests AKA test positivity rate

Daily new cases as percentage of tests is a very relevant figure to look at.

Charts of it on a per U.S. state basis are available here:

• Track Testing Trends, coronavirus.jhu.edu

A chart on the U.S. level is available here:

• covidtracking.com

I could create a plot for Wikipedia, using data from https://covidtracking.com/data/download. However, they have some curious data license here: https://covidtracking.com/about-data/license. I have no idea what kind of thing a "data license" could be, in terms of U.S. law; data is not copyrightable as far as I know. Furthermore, U.S. has no database protection law. Could someone clarify whether that "data license" has any force at all? Could we use the data to create a plot? Alternatively, is there is different data source for U.S. test counts that does not confuse the user with a "data license"? --Dan Polansky (talk) 17:18, 8 July 2020 (UTC)

Charts for various countries including U.S. here:

• The share of daily COVID-19 tests that are positive - Our World in Data, ourworldindata.org

--Dan Polansky (talk) 18:04, 8 July 2020 (UTC)

A long page at OWID on testing:

• https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing - includes multiple very relevant charts and maps, and more, for the world, including US.

--Dan Polansky (talk) 10:00, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Test positivity rate for US, calculated from Our World in Data, from owid-covid-data.csv[1], smoothed via 7-day moving average:

--Dan Polansky (talk) 14:44, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Awk oneliner for Windows to calculate the above rate from new cases and new tests:

awk -F, "$1==\"USA\" && $14>0 {printf \"%s %.1f\n\", $4, 100*($6/$14)}" owid-covid-data.csv

By changing the above filter from USA to something else, you can get data for a different country. --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:48, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Test positivity rate in %, top 7 U.S. states, July 15, 7-day moving average, from coronavirus.jhu.edu[2]:

--Dan Polansky (talk) 09:06, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

Semi log plot hiding the true situation

Could I suggest that the semi-log plot near the top of the page is of little value at the moment, as the marked changes in infection rates are resulting in small changes when plotted this way. These graphs are only of real use to people used to looking at semi-log plots, which is a reasonably small percentage of the population. I would much prefer to see the number of cases vs time plot (on linear scales) shown near the end of the page here, as it would bring home to the casual reader what the true situation is. Ditto the number of deaths vs time plot. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.172.113.133 (talk) 06:43, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

Semi log plot is useful but the above is right in that normal plot would be useful as well. The problem is with the graphical representation in Timeline section, which has days going vertically down instead of giving a normal plot with time on x-axis; and one day takes up a whole line of printed text. That representation further gives changes in cases as percent agains previous day, which is misleading since that is not adjusted for changes in daily tests; in fact, the semilog plot is misleading in the same regard: it suggests exponential growth trends in cases (as straight lines on the semilog plot) which are not adjusted for growth of daily tests and therefore misrepresent the true growth rates, typically by depicting higher growth than actual as long as daily tests are increasing.

The plot sought by the above anon seems to be one similar to what is given at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/, "Daily New Cases in the United States", but here again beware that this is not adjusted for growth of daily tests and therefore is misleading. For plots that do not suffer from this misleading effect, see links at #Daily new cases as percentage of tests AKA test positivity rate above. --Dan Polansky (talk) 10:10, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

My biggest complaint with that chart is the *unlabeled* % increase (or at least I think that's what it is, because the chart doesn't say!) It's misleading. 2% of a 3,429,626 case load is way different than 2% of say a 1,005,522 case load. That % makes the daily increase look minuscule, and it's not. It's at record levels. I believe it was JHU that listed todays increase as 81,000 cases. WorldOmetsers lists the days increase at 73,000-and-change. TrilliumLady (talk) 05:27, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

Need to cite sources, esp. in "Number of U.S. cases by date" and "Progression charts" sections

I have searched in vain for sourcing for the critical cases/deaths/etc charts in these two (sub)sections. Specific inline citations with live links should be provided for each chart. Can someone please add them, for WP:Verifiability? —RCraig09 (talk) 22:37, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

Sources:

• https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/cases-in-us.html - has current cases and also a chart for US cases by date
• https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/, daily cases and deaths on US level and per US state, probably sourced from CDC

But you are right, there are no sources indicated above or under the charts you mentioned, and people who update the charts should ideally fix that. A plain link to the source like this[3] would go a long way to help. --Dan Polansky (talk) 10:05, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Temporal "benchmarks on the Progression et. al charts under statistics

Any chance of bringing back more frequent (like weekly) dates on the X-axis on those charts? The notations on the X-axis need to be corrected, anyway. If you count the daily dots, starting from "July," that last dot in those curves is for July 21 or 22 .... TrilliumLady (talk) 05:19, 17 July 2020 (UTC)