Yesterday, President Trump claimed that Covid-19 was “surging” in New Zealand, a country widely lauded as having successfully contained and suppressed their outbreak. That has allowed Wellington to reopen large swathes of their economy without incident.
Until this surge.
And by surge we mean something like 30 cases in 3 days. So, let’s compare that surge to the numbers of new cases in the United States.
Now, to be fair, New Zealand has a population of nearly 5 million, the United States has nearly 335 million. So a direct number-to-number comparison of the number of new cases per day isn’t fair.
So let’s look at the number of new cases per million people, which equalises the data for population.
So yeah, New Zealand is not “surging”. The data shows that even with the more limited testing per capita conducted in the United States, we are nowhere near the point of bending the curve anywhere close to zero.
This week is the Democratic National Convention. Organisers scheduled it for Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but that’s obviously not happening. This post is a short one, but like last week’s not entirely about data visualisation. I want to take a quick look at the identity or logo for the event.
It’s a simple lockup and features D20 in a Helvetica-like grotesk typeface (update: it looks like it’s Neue-Haas Grotesk) with a star imposed atop the D at a slight angle such that the tops of two points are vertically aligned with the stem of the letter. It allows for an arrow to be drawn out of the shape to point forward.
Then we get to the 20. It has the Lower 48 imposed in the 0 to be the letterform’s counter.
But what about Alaska and Hawaii?
To be fair, it’s not like we haven’t mentioned this before. And even in political campaigns we’ve seen this approach taken, remember just four years ago?
That all said, what I do like about the design of the Democratic Convention version compared to the Marco Rubio version is the treatment of the shape. In the convention version, we have a greatly simplified shape with fewer features. Compare that shape to an actual map and you’ll see it wildly incorrect. Michigan’s Upper Peninsula anyone?
Whereas in the Rubio version, you can see it is more geographically accurate, but that makes the shape fuzzy and indistinct at small scale, harder to read. Florida and New England are spindly and Texas barely points south.
We really should drop this visual language, but if we are going to insist upon using it, at least do it well. And that’s what we get out of the D20 Convention mark.
Credit for the pieces to their respective design teams.
So here are the charts from the last week of Covid data in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Illinois.
When we compare last week’s update to today’s, we can see that Pennsylvania did indeed bottom out and is back on the rise and the same can probably be said for Delaware. Although a fair amount of the one-day spikes in those numbers we see today are from an outbreak in a correctional system.
Whilst Virginia did go up, by week’s end, it had settled back down to a point not dissimilar to last week. So nothing really changed and time stood still in Virginia. The same can also be loosely said for New Jersey, where it was more about fluctuations than determined rises or falls.
In Illinois, however, we finally saw a plateauing of the new cases numbers and with the slightest of declines .
New cases curve in PA, NJ, DE, VA, and IL.
Then in deaths we have not much to say as they remain low in New Jersey and Delaware and stable and moderate in Illinois.
Virginia’s recent spike appears to have subsided, as it’s back to nearly 10 deaths per day from the virus.
But most concerning is Pennsylvania. Here, while the numbers are still relatively low, they are on a slow and gradual rise. At this point the seven-day average is beginning to rise above 20 deaths per day.
Happy Friday, everyone. We’ve made it to the end of the week. Yesterday, I departed from the usual data visualisation discourse and delved into some branding/identity work. Spoilers, that’s a good part of my career as well.
But I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how the armed forces branch could be represented through some different typographic choices.
Like I discussed yesterday, the designers behind the new logo made some interesting choices. But the idea of setting the words in a geometric sans serif makes a lot of sense.
But a space force is really just the beginning of the American Empire. In Spacceeee. And so a typeface that evokes the expansion of an empire might work. So why not Trajan, inspired by the carved letters in Trajan’s column, a monument to Emperor Trajan and his victory over the Dacians.
On the other hand, this administration isn’t the best with design. And so instead of a lovely but imperial face, they would probably just choose something safe like a Garamond.
Not as grand, and a bit bookish, this doesn’t work really well for an armed forces branch. In Spacceeee. Plus, we also know that President Trump likes to brand everything with himself. And several years ago, Buzzfeed paid a type designer to create a typeface from some handwritten notes they had from Trump. They put it out for the public and of course I downloaded it. So it wouldn’t be surprising to see Space Force in Trump’s own hand.
Little difficult to read, but there is an interesting blend of upper and lower case letters in Trump’s handwriting. Maybe that could work with bringing big space to the little people of planet Earth?
Nah, who am I kidding? We’re all here for what it really should be:
Yep, that’s still a thing. I’ll spare you all the long history of Space Force, because we’ve all pointed and laughed at that enough. So much so there is a Netflix show about it. There was an old logo for Space Force, which basically was the logo for Starfleet Command. You know, the fictional Space Force of Star Trek.
Well, now there’s a new Space Force logo.
And, well, it’s still Star Trek-y. But at least they dropped the most obvious bits. But I want to point out that typography. I get it, geommetric sans serif representing science, technology, the future. Safe pick, easily defensible. But look at those slices in the stems and the crossbars.
I can understand those in the E and F perhaps. But the slices to the stems of the P, F, and R make those letters feel unsteady, as if you had managed to just axe a good chunk out of a tree trunk but somehow the rest of the tree was still upright.
And I would argue further that there’s way too much angling going on, or at least it’s all inconsistent. They have this nice delta shape with its angles. Those could be reflected in the typography. The C comes closest, but in a close examination, it’s also not a match.
And so if you pretend the C is correct, with some less severe slices to the E and F perhaps, you can begin to see how a more refined Space Force logo could emerge. I used the blue lines, pulling off the strong angle in the delta shape, to slice the ends of the Es and F. (I don’t have a match for the original typeface, so I subbed in Avenir Next.)
I think that the quick exercise above, if paired with the original typeface, could work a bit better.
Credit for the original goes to somebody, no idea whom.
Whenever someone not named Eovaldi or Perez starts a Red Sox game in 2020, that’s when.
We all know the Red Sox are the worst team in the American League. They have only two starters, maybe sometimes a third. And then the last two days of the regular five-day rotation cycle, manager Ron Roenicke throws some relievers at the wall and sees which ones stick that night. Spoiler: Few do.
But as much as I enjoy listening to the three-man broadcasting booth (Remy and Eck make the games fun to at least listen to) the games are unwatchable. And then to hear them try and dress a game up as having an opener? Well, what is the opener?
For the non-baseball fans, most are probably aware enough that some guy goes out to a small hill and throws (pitches) a ball at a batter for most of the night. Then towards the end, when the guy’s energy wanes, he is replaced by some guy who throws really fast. That’s over simplified, but that’s a normal ballgame. A starting pitcher records five, but ideally at least six, innings of work before handing the ball over to an eighth-inning setup man and then a ninth-inning closer. Sometimes a really good seventh-inning reliever sets up the setup man.
A bullpen game, by contrast, is when a bunch of those relief pitchers handle the entire game. Usually this would be after a game went into extra innings (since baseball cannot end in a tie, unless you’re in an All Star game), and the next day’s starting pitcher had to finish the long game by pitching several innings. With nobody available to throw six innings, a bunch of relievers come in and try to cover that by pitching one, two, or three innings each.
The opener game is relatively new. The idea is in addition to the really good closer, a really good opener records the first inning or two (3–6 outs) to deal with the opposing team’s best hitters. He then hands the ball over to a mediocre starting pitcher who throws the next four or five innings, who then hands the ball over to the late-inning relief specialists. Doing it this way, the starter avoids one set of at-bats or plate appearances by the opposition’s best hitters.
But when is an opener just a bullpen game? Well, it’s when that mediocre starting pitcher isn’t really a starting pitcher. And when he doesn’t even throw four or five innings. Basically all the Red Sox games this year.
I made a graphic this morning to contrast those different types of games and compare them to a game I watched two nights ago between the Red Sox and the Tampa Bay Rays. The game was teed up as an opener with a good relief pitcher by the name of Ryan Brasier starting the first inning. But then instead of a mediocre starter pitching four or five innings, we got a mediocre reliever pitching three innings. He handed it over to a guy who was supposed to go maybe two, but couldn’t get through his second inning. He handed it over to another guy, who handed it over to another guy, who handed it over to a final guy. And none of those last guys were the good relievers you would typically expect to see. (Though, to be fair, the Sox weren’t winning, so why use your best relievers?)
Different game types compared
Credit for the piece is mine.
Credit for the Red Sox dumpster fire of a season goes to John Henry and ownership.
For those of my readers who live in a city where the subway or underground is a great means of getting around the city, you know you really miss that late Saturday night/early Sunday morning bouquet in the air. Though as this New York Times piece explains, sure it smells bad, but that air is probably safer than you dining indoors at a restaurant or even a child attending class in person.
The piece focuses on New York City subway cars, but they are very similar to the rest of the stock used in the United States. It uses a scrolling reveal to show how the air circulation and filtration systems work. Then it concludes with a model of how a person sneezing appears, both with and without a mask. (Spoiler, wear a mask.)
It’s a really nicely done and informative piece. It compares the rate of air recycled in a subway car to that of several other locations, and the results were a bit surprising to me. Of course, early on in the pandemic before we began to fully understand it, the threat was thought to be from contaminated surfaces—and let’s be honest, there are a lot of contaminated surfaces in a New York City subway car—but we now know the real risk is particles breathed/coughed/sneezed out from one’s mouth and nose. And we can now see just how efficient subways are at cycling and filtering that air.
Credit for the piece goes to Mika Gröndahl, Christina Goldbaum, and Jeremy White.
Weekend data means, usually, lower numbers than weekdays. And with the exception of Delaware that’s what we have today. Some drops, like Illinois, are more dramatic than others, like New Jersey. And so we look at the seven-day trend.
And that tells a slightly different story. On the one hand we have states like Virginia and Illinois that appear to be continuing upward. The rise in Illinois has been slow and steady, but the average is approaching nearly 2000 new cases per day. In Virgina, the rise was more abrupt and the question is whether this peak has crested in recent days or if come the middle of next week it will resume rising.
In New Jersey and Delaware we see two states with does declines after some sudden spurts of new cases. Jersey had risen to nearly 500 new cases less than two weeks ago, but that’s now back down to fewer than 350. And in Delaware, while today’s number is greater than yesterday’s, the trend is still downard after being at over 100 new cases per day two weeks ago.
New cases curves for Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Illinois.
Then we have Pennsylvania. At one point doing it had done so well in controlling the outbreak to bend the curve to fewer than 500 new cases per day at one point. Then as the state began to reopen, cases began to rise again in the west and now the east. But over the last week that statewide average began to fall. But in the last two days that fall appears to have potentially bottomed out. So come the middle of next week, the question will be does the downward trend continue or has the state hit a new valley before another rise?
Finally, in terms of new deaths, with the exception of Virgina, we have yet to see any rise in deaths that might correlate with the recent rises in new cases. And so nothing new there. But it’s worth pointing out that New Jersey has now reached the high single digits in terms of daily deaths from Covid-19. That’s remarkable for a state that back in April saw nearly 300 people dying every single day.
New death curves for Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Illinois.
This week is almost over and so instead of a graphic about unemployment numbers, let’s look at a piece from xkcd that provides us all with a new rating scale.
Because, let’s be honest, we all at some point are going to need to rate 2020 come December. And while we still have almost five months remaining, what are you thinking?
Hurricane Isaias ran up the East Coast of the United States then the Hudson River Valley before entering Canada. Before it left the US, however, it dumped some record-setting amounts of rain in Philadelphia and across the region. And in times of heavy rains, the lower-lying areas of the city (and suburbs like Upper Darby and Downingtown to mention a few) face inundation from swollen rivers and creeks. And in the city itself, the neighbourhood of Eastwick is partially built upon a floodplain. So staying atop river levels is important and the National Weather Service has been doing that for years.
The National Weather Service graphic above is from this very morning and represents the water level of the Schuylkill River (the historical Philadelphia was sited between two rivers, the more commonly known Delaware and its tributary the Schuylkill), which receives water from the suburbs to the north and west of the city, the area hardest hit by Isaias’ rainfall.
The chart looks at the recent as well as the forecast stages of the river. Not surprisingly, the arrival of Isaias accounts for the sudden rise in the blue line. But there is a lot going on here, yellows, reds, and purples, some kind of NOAA logo behind the chart, labels sitting directly on lines, and some of the type is pixellated and difficult to read.
But it does do a nice job of showing the differences in observations and forecast points in time. By that I mean, a normal line chart has an equal distribution of observations along its length. There is an equal space between the weeks or the months or the years. But in instances like this, observations may not be continuous—imagine a flood destroying a sensor—or here that the forecasts are not as frequently produced as observations. And so these are all called out by the dots on the lines we see.
This is the chart I am accustomed to seeing. But then last night, reading about the damage I came across this graphic (screenshot also from this morning to compare to above) from the Philadelphia Inquirer.
It takes the same data and presents it a cleaner, clearer fashion. The flood stages are far easier to read. Gone is the NOAA logo and the unnecessary vertical gridlines. The type is far more legible and the palette less jarring and puts the data series in front and centre.
In general, this is a tremendous improvement for the legibility of the chart. I would probably use a different colour for the record flood stage line, or given their use of solid lines for the axis maybe make it dotted. But that’s a small quibble.
The only real issue here is what happens to the time? Compare the frequent observations in the past in the original, every half hour or so, to the six hourly dots (the blue versus the purple). In the Inquirer version, those spaces between forecast points disappear and become the same as the half-hour increments.
To be fair, the axis labelleing implies this as the label goes from August 4 to 5 and then jumps all the way to 7, but it is not as intuitive as it could be. Here I would recommend following the National Weather Service’s fashion of adjusting for the time gap. It would probably mean some kind of design tweak to emphasise that the observations earlier than now are observed every half hour or so, versus the six-hour forecasts. The NWS did this through dots. One could use a dotted line, or some other design treatment.
This missing time is the only thing really holding back this piece from the Inquirer from standing out as a great update of the traditional National Weather Service hydrograph chart.
Credit for the National Weather Service piece goes to the National Weather Service.
Credit for the Inquirer piece goes to Dominique DeMoe.
