[FRIAM] NYU Professor Creates COVID-19 Dashboard to Compare Country and State Data

Thu Jan 28 10:38:06 EST 2021

Tom, you’re a journalist, so now that I have your (virtual and 
asynchronous) attention, I’d like to register some complaints.

We seem to get the same data again and again, but there is critical data 
that noone has included in what I’ve read. Two examples:

1. We get daily death rates and number of hospitalizations, but no 
information about the average length of a hospital stay for a covid 
patient. This may not seem important, but if I want to compute the 
probability of dying from covid once you are hospitalized, I need it. It 
is (deaths/hospitalizations)*length-of-stay — this is because one 
person contributes 1 to the count of hospitalization for each day he is 
hospitalized, but can contribute at most 1 to the deaths. The naive 
calculation of the probability would be about 3% (3K/100K), but if the 
length of stay is 5 or 6 days, the true calculations show the odds of 
survival are the same as one round of Russian roulette.

It’s possible that the journalists have not given us this data because 
the data sites (covidtracking.com and Johns Hopkins) don’t have it. 
Good opportunity for a “scoop”.

2. A definition of a voting machine. Based on my experience in NM and in 
North Carolina, the only machines were scanners. I have seen one 
photograph of a Dominion “voting machine”, and  the branding on the 
machine said “Dominion scanner.” It would be hard to corruptly 
modify the results from the scanner, and absolutely impossible to do so 
in a case where the hand count matches the scanner count. Fifteen years 
ago, there were lots of voting machines that did not produce paper 
ballots, and these were eminently hackable. But no journalist I’ve 
read has made any distinction between the machine types (and it is 
possible that all modern voting machines are scanners reading paper 
ballots. If so, tell us.)

You are of course innocent of these lapses, but maybe you could tell 
some of your journalist friends that they are leaving out vital 
information.

Thanks for listening (if you got this far).

—Barry

On 27 Jan 2021, at 14:49, Tom Johnson wrote:

> NYU Professor Creates COVID-19 Dashboard to Compare Country and State 
> Data
> by Sabrina I. Pacifici
> <https://www.cloudhq-mkt9.net/mail_track/link/a9654e6b1556032541_1611776974509?uid=226430&url=https%3A%2F%2Flc3.shitrk.com%2Fr%2Fe%2FY0B3ls5OLKvTaBGYJ%3Fr%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.bespacific.com%2Fauthor%2Fsabrina%2F>
> on Jan
> 26, 2021
>
> “A new online dashboard
> <https://www.cloudhq-mkt9.net/mail_track/link/a9654e6b1556032541_1611776974509?uid=226430&url=https%3A%2F%2Flc3.shitrk.com%2Fr%2Fe%2FnwbGJf0b3oQtOZ9xM%3Fr%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fcovid.jerschow.com%2F>,
> created by NYU Professor Alexej Jerschow
> <https://www.cloudhq-mkt9.net/mail_track/link/a9654e6b1556032541_1611776974509?uid=226430&url=https%3A%2F%2Flc3.shitrk.com%2Fr%2Fe%2F60j9rsYnQRpCAGg4Q%3Fr%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fas.nyu.edu%2Fcontent%2Fnyu-as%2Fas%2Ffaculty%2Falexej-jerschow.html>,
> brings together COVID-19 data from U.S. states and countries around 
> the
> world to compare cases, deaths, vaccines, and testing in a visual,
> user-friendly format.  The tool also integrates a range of policies
> governments have implemented to limit the spread of 
> COVID-19—including
> school closings, stay-at-home orders, and mask mandates—in an effort 
> to
> compare policy responses with COVID-19 outcomes.Jerschow, who is a
> professor of chemistry and typically works in the field of magnetic
> resonance imaging and battery research, was looking for a convenient 
> way to
> compare COVID-19 data from different countries and states. While the 
> data
> were available from different sources, there was not a single tool 
> that
> allowed him to easily analyze how different geographic areas were 
> faring
> and responding to the pandemic—so, he created one…The dashboard
> <https://www.cloudhq-mkt9.net/mail_track/link/a9654e6b1556032541_1611776974509?uid=226430&url=https%3A%2F%2Flc3.shitrk.com%2Fr%2Fe%2FnwbGJf0b3oQtOZ9xM%3Fr%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fcovid.jerschow.com%2F>
> combines
> data from a series of publicly available sources. Country-wide 
> information
> is downloaded from Our World in Data
> <https://www.cloudhq-mkt9.net/mail_track/link/a9654e6b1556032541_1611776974509?uid=226430&url=https%3A%2F%2Flc3.shitrk.com%2Fr%2Fe%2F0br9NiGe3nrF3ma6M%3Fr%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fourworldindata.org%2Fcoronavirus>,
> which sources its data from the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems 
> Science
> and Engineering dashboard
> <https://www.cloudhq-mkt9.net/mail_track/link/a9654e6b1556032541_1611776974509?uid=226430&url=https%3A%2F%2Flc3.shitrk.com%2Fr%2Fe%2F20a9LsP2l7OTXERVM%3Fr%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fcoronavirus.jhu.edu%2Fmap.html>.
> U.S. state and territory data are obtained from covidtracking.com
> <https://www.cloudhq-mkt9.net/mail_track/link/a9654e6b1556032541_1611776974509?uid=226430&url=https%3A%2F%2Flc3.shitrk.com%2Fr%2Fe%2Fw3z5Jh4ZxLoiRa56B%3Fr%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fcovidtracking.com%2F>.
> The Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT)
> <https://www.cloudhq-mkt9.net/mail_track/link/a9654e6b1556032541_1611776974509?uid=226430&url=https%3A%2F%2Flc3.shitrk.com%2Fr%2Fe%2FW9OxRfQxV1nH40zGw%3Fr%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.bsg.ox.ac.uk%2Fresearch%2Fresearch-projects%2Fcoronavirus-government-response-tracker>
> provides
> policy data…”
>
> ============================================
> Tom Johnson - tom at jtjohnson.com
> <https://www.cloudhq-mkt9.net/mail_track/link/a9654e6b1556032541_1611776974509?uid=226430&url=mailto%3Atom%40jtjohnson.com>
> Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
> 505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
> *NM Foundation for Open Government*
> <https://www.cloudhq-mkt9.net/mail_track/link/a9654e6b1556032541_1611776974509?uid=226430&url=https%3A%2F%2Flc3.shitrk.com%2Fr%2Fe%2F5KGR4cK49zVSrMkPr%3Fr%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fnmfog.org%2F>
> *Check out It's The People's Data
> <https://www.cloudhq-mkt9.net/mail_track/link/a9654e6b1556032541_1611776974509?uid=226430&url=https%3A%2F%2Flc3.shitrk.com%2Fr%2Fe%2FBNmKkirZWQPirw9Pg%3Fr%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fpages%2FIts-The-Peoples-Data%2F1599854626919671>*
>
> ============================================

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