bar chart – Page 5 – Coffee Spoons

Hot and Not So Hot Graphics

Thankfully today’s forecast calls for cooler temperatures. Your author is not a fan of hot weather, which means being outside in summer is…less than ideal. It also means that the air conditioner runs frequently and on high for a few months. (Conversely, I can probably count on one hand the number of times I turned on the heat this winter.)

The problem is, the two biggest contributors to US carbon emissions? Heating/cooling and transport. In other words, heating your home in the winter, cooling it in the summer, and then driving your non-electric vehicle.

After the recent heatwave in New England, the Boston Globe examined the impact of the heatwave on the environment. The article led with the claim it used four charts to do so. I quibble with that distinction because this is a screenshot of the second graphic.

I mean, it’s not prose text. Rather, we have three factettes paired with illustrations. At the top of this post, I mentioned the impact of transport for a reason. In an ideal world, in order to get carbon emissions under control one of the changes we would need to see is getting people out of their personal automobiles and into mass transit. Subways and light rail are far cleaner and can actually be cheaper for households than car ownership. And so we should be encouraging their use and building more of them.

Look above and you’ll see an icon of a subway car. Except it’s not. The graphic/factette is actually talking about rail cars full of coal that transport fuel from mine to generating station. Those look more like this, from James St. James via Wikimedia Commons.

Small, subtle details matter. And so I’d propose a new icon that tries to capture the industrial coal train, ideally something that I spent more than five minutes on.

But it breaks the linkage between passenger train and coal train, which is not ideal for the purposes of an article highlighting the environmental impacts of US households.

That all said, the article did a really good job with the other graphics it used. My favourite was this chart, decidedly not a combination chart.

It looks at the correlation between high temperatures and energy usage. But, instead of lazily throwing the temperatures atop the bars, the designers more carefully placed them below the energy usage chart. The top chart should look familiar to those who have been following my Covid-19 charts, a daily number that then has the rolling seven-day average plotted above it to smooth out any one-day quirks. The designer then chose to highlight the heatwave in red.

For temperatures, I like the overall approach. But I wonder if a more nuanced approach could have taken the graph a step farther to excellent. Presently we have a single red line representing daily average high temperature. But in the plot above we use red to indicate the heat wave of early June, five consecutive days of temperatures in excess of 90ºF. What if that line were black or grey or some neutral colour, and then only the heatwave was coloured in red? It would more clearly link the two together. And it avoids the trap of red implying heat, when you need to only go back to late May when the East Coast had early spring like temperatures near 50ºF, decidedly not red on a temperature scale.

Overall, though, it’s refreshing to see a thoughtful approach taken here instead of the usual slapdash throw one chart atop the other.

And the rest of the article uses restrained, smart graphics as well. Bar charts and small multiples to capture air pollution and EMS calls. You should read the full article for the insights and the feedback loops we have.

After all, it’s not that the heating/cooling is itself the problem, especially since the removal of CFCs since the Montreal Protocol in 1987 that banned those pesky chemicals that harm the ozone layer—remember when that was the big environmental issue in the 1990s? The issue is how we generate the electricity that powers the heating/cooling systems—and if you want to use electric cars, whence comes their electric charge—as if we’re using coal plants, that just exacerbates the problem. But if we use carbon-less plants, e.g. nuclear, solar, or wind, we’re not generating carbon emissions.

Credit for the piece goes to John Hancock.

Covid Update: 20 June

So today’s post will be a little bit shorter than usual. The big reason is probably good, but also worth addressing. States are increasingly less reliable about their data. For several weeks I have mentioned that Philadelphia had not been updating their vaccination data. Last week or two weeks ago I noticed a small line of text had been inserted saying they were ramping down reporting to just two days per week. That’s unfortunate, because Philadelphia County represents 1/9 of Pennsylvania and that can make a significant impact on the Commonwealth’s total numbers.

But this week we have Illinois. There’s been no update since Friday and it’s not clear if this is due to a glitch, or given the coincidence, a change in reporting schedule that omits weekend data updates. Not reporting for a weekend is not a big deal, as states often have to perform back-end server maintenance or clean up data and the best time for that is the weekend. But heretofore, Illinois had been the most reliable state in terms of reporting data.

There was one thing I wanted to address this week, but the lack of Illinois data makes that tricky. So I may have to wait and maybe do it next week or later this week.

Anyway, the data below is not quite as up-to-date for Illinois, but we’ll see how the Land of Lincoln addresses the issue probably today.

New case curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.

Otherwise, the numbers are good. Yes, the downward slopes are shallowing out and that is increasingly obvious, but there’s increasingly less room to drop. Pennsylvania, for example, last week was just over 400 new cases per day, but the seven-day average now sits at 261. Illinois last week sat at 336, but as of its last update, that was down to 237. Virginia’s decrease was smaller, from 143 to 129, while Delaware fell from 33 to 27.

Only in New Jersey have we seen the seven-day average rise, from 168 to 179. This was not a one-off spike, however. As the delta variant takes hold in the United States, the variant brings increased ease of transmission and more severe effects for younger populations, the population group last to vaccinate and increasingly seen as not willing to vaccinate. Is this driving the slight uptick in New Jersey we saw last week? It’s too early to say.

But it serves as a reminder to everyone, please, if you haven’t already, get vaccinated.

Deaths now appear to be dropping once again across the board.

Last we discussed Pennsylvania bottoming out around that 18 deaths per day level. After a week of declines, that average is now down to just under 12 deaths per day. If we see continued progress, perhaps this time next week I can be writing about the Commonwealth’s seven-day average dropping into the single digits for the first time since April 2020.

Illinois also looked like it was slowing, but again, the lack of data is making it hard to say one way or another. But at last report, the average was down to 14 deaths per day.

Last week we also discussed a slowing rate in New Jersey, and that continued to slow, but still continued to fall and deaths are now at 5.6 per day. And after a rise I noted last week, Virginia is back below double digits and at 6.3 deaths per day.

Delaware actually managed to hit 0.0 deaths per day for a stretch of two days last week as it went a week-plus without a single Covid-19 death. It has had a few reported over the weekend and so that number is up, but still below 1 as we head into the week.

Vaccinations remain the slowing curve that we saw last week.

Thankfully we can see Virginia is now approaching and, hopefully, can cross the 50% fully vaccinated rate by the end of the week. Pennsylvania, again, is hard to gauge. The numbers sit at 46.7%, but the Philadelphia numbers have not updated in four days, so that could add a half percentage point or, earlier in the vaccination push, more. Optimistically, however, we are looking at numbers nearing 50%.

Credit for the piece is mine.

Biden’s English Ancestry

We all know Joe Biden as the Irish American president. And that’s no malarkey. But, go back far enough in your family tree and you may find some interesting ancestry and ethnic origins and that’s no different with Joe Biden. Keep in mind that our number of ancestors doubles every generation. You have four grandparents, and many of us met most of them. But you had eight great-grandparents. How many of those did you know? And you had 16 great-great-grandparents, you likely didn’t know any of them personally. It becomes pretty easy for an ethnic line to sneak into your ancestry.

And in Biden’s case it may well be English. Although sneaking in is probably a stretch, as this BBC article points out, because his patrilineal line, i.e. his father’s father’s father’s, &c., is likely English. Of course back in the day the Irish and the English mixing would have been unconscionable, at least as my grandmother would have described it. And so it’s easy to see how the exact origins of family lines are quietly forgotten. But that’s why we have genealogists.

The article eschews the traditional family tree graphic and instead uses only two charts. The first is a simple timeline of Biden’s direct ancestors.

No, it’s no family tree, but timelines are a critical tool used by genealogists because at its core, genealogy is all about time and place. And a timeline has got one of those two facets covered.

Timelines help visualise stories in chronological order. I cannot tell you the number of family trees I have seen where people who create trees casually simply copy and paste data without scrutiny. Children born well after the deaths of parents are common. Or children born to parents in their 50s or 60s—perhaps not strictly impossible, but certainly highly irregular. And so to see Biden’s ancestors plotted out chronologically is a common graphic for those who do any work in genealogy, which my regular readers know is my hobby.

That alone would make the article worth sharing. Because, I enjoyed that graphic. I probably would have created a separate line for the birthplace of each individual, but I quibble.

However, we have another graphic that’s not so great. And once again with the BBC I’m talking about axis lines.

Here we have a chart looking at US ancestry as claimed in the US censuses of 1980 and 2000. But we do not have any vertical lines making it easy for readers to accurately compare the lengths of the various bars. Twice lately I’ve posted about axis lines and the BBC. Third time’s the charm?

We can also look at using these not as bars, but as line charts as I did in this re-imagining to the right.

First, we no longer need two distinct colours, though you could argue the English line should be a highlight or call out colour given its role in the article. Instead each line receives a label at the right and only the English line crosses any other, but given their point-to-point slope, it’s not confusing like a line chart with all years between 1980 and 2000 could be.

Secondly, the slope here of the line reinforces the idea of falling population numbers. The bar chart also shows this, but through a leftward movement in bars. The bar option certainly works and there’s nothing wrong with it, but these lines offer a more intuitive concept of falling numbers.

I also added some clarification to the data definition. These lines represent the number of people who reported at least one ethnic ancestry—at the time US census respondents could enter upwards of two. For myself, as an example, I could have entered Irish and Carpatho-Rusyn. But my own small sliver of English ancestry would have been left off the list.

Ultimately, the declining numbers of responses along with some reporting on self-identification points to the disappearing concepts of “Irish American” or “English American” as many increasingly see themselves as simply White Americans. But that’s a story for another day.

In the meantime, we have Joe Biden, the Irish American president, with a small bit of English ancestry. Those interested in the genealogy, the article also includes some nice photos of baptismal records and marriage records. It’s an interesting read, though I’m hungry for more as it’s a very light duty pass.

Credit for the BBC pieces goes to the BBC graphics department.

Credit for my reimagination is mine.

Covid Update: 13 June

Last week I mentioned how the rate of decline in new cases had begun to fall significantly, largely due to two factors. The first is good, that we are reaching low levels of new cases overall, but the second is bad, that we see a large proportion of the population hesitant to receive their vaccines. (The vaccines have been proven safe, effective, and they’re free. If you haven’t received your shots yet, I highly encourage you to do so.)

This past week that trend for new cases largely continued. But another issue I was concerned about was a slight uptick, given that last Sunday’s daily new case data was higher than the previous Sunday’s. So as we look at the chart of new case curves, how are we doing?

Good news. Those numbers are back on the decline and, in fact, the daily numbers from this Sunday are lower than those of even two weeks ago. We would have had a more muddled picture if the numbers were lower than last week, but still higher than two weeks ago. This leaves me more assured that the numbers are in fact still headed down and the few upticks are outliers and not a trend.

I also wanted to point out another data point this week. This coming week will mark the one-year anniversaries of the summer lows we saw in 2020. These were the points at which Covid-19 was at its lowest ebb after the initial spring wave and then the rise in cases beginning in late summer and early autumn. This most recent spring, despite the initial burst of reopening, our new case levels never fell to anywhere near the summer lows.

I will chart more of this likely next week as we hit all but one of those milestones. But as a teaser, today, 14 June was the lowest point for Delaware, which on that day had a seven-day average of 46 new cases per day. The average heading into today’s data release? 33. Or in other words, Delaware is averaging almost 25% fewer new cases now than it was at last year’s summer nadir.

But as we head into the week, you can see from the charts above that the numbers for all five states are quite low. Pennsylvania and Illinois lead, but are also some of the most populated states in the country. They sit at 403 and 336, respectively. New Jersey and Virginia, more middle-tier states in terms of population, are also fairly close with their new cases as their averages begin the week at 168 and 143, respectively. Delaware, as we noted above is sitting on 33.

So what about deaths? Last week I discussed a pattern of bottoming out, especially for Pennsylvania and Illinois. Unfortunately, I also noted how Pennsylvania had an aberrant large, one-day spike of deaths that influenced the seven-day average.

This week you can clearly see that spike in Pennsylvania phasing out of the data set. That’s good, because it allows us to begin to evaluate the true state of Pennsylvania’s average. That average? 18, which is squarely in line with the average before the spike. In other words, Pennsylvania may have indeed bottomed out.

Illinois, however, has resumed a slight push downward, as the seven-day average yesterday just hit 16, down three from Saturday’s 19. I’ll want to see that trend persist throughout the week before saying that Illinois has resumed declining death rates, but it’s a good start to the week.

In New Jersey and Delaware we continue to see falling numbers of deaths. This time last week we saw a small cluster of deaths that brought Delaware up from 0.3 deaths per day to 2.3. But Delaware is now back down to 0.3, perhaps the lowest it reasonably expected to be. New Jersey had just managed to fall below 10 deaths per day, and it’s nearly halved that at it enters the week at 6.3.

Virginia, unfortunately, is the outlier. Deaths had slipped below 10 for over a week. And last week they fell as low as 7.7. But as of yesterday they have climbed back over 10. We need to watch this week to see if there is truly a rising number of deaths or if we are seeing the emergence of more of a bottom or floor in terms of deaths.

Finally we have vaccinations.

Unfortunately, the City of Philadelphia’s website has been broken for over a week and they’re now only reporting updates twice a week anyway. In other words, the data for Pennsylvania isn’t great. Because while we can report the rest of the Commonwealth, the City of Philadelphia—excluding the suburban counties—on its own represents nearly 13% of Pennsylvania. That’s a huge chunk to be missing.

That leaves us with Illinois and Virginia.

The good news is that they are going up and that Illinois just hit 45% fully vaccinated. Virginia is now at 47%. The bad news is that it took a week for both states to climb up one percentage point. More evidence that vaccinations are slowing dramatically with millions left unvaccinated.

And we’re going to need them to get vaccinated. Consider the United Kingdom, another Western country doing well in its vaccination programme and that had decided to increasingly open up large swathes of its economy.

That is now on hold for another four weeks. The UK had planned to end its lockdown on 21 June, but that will now be extended into the end of July. And it’s all due to the Delta, formerly Indian, variant that has taken root in the UK. It’s more transmissible than the earlier UK variant, which the UK called the Kent variant.

The Delta variant has emerged in small numbers here in the US. But in order to prevent another surge that could threaten our healthcare systems, we need to get people vaccinated. It’s not inconceivable that the US may need to reinstate restrictions or full lockdowns if the Delta variant were to take root and swamp the US healthcare system.

And so I will end this post as I began it. If you haven’t started your vaccination process, I encourage you to do so. The vaccines have been proven safe and effective. And if you’re worried about cost, they’re free.

Credit for the piece is mine.

Covid Update: 7 Jun

Technical difficulties yesterday. But I wanted to run the latest Covid numbers to start this week of posting, so we’re just going to use the Monday data, which is the lowest of the week since it captures the data reported by authorities on Sunday. That said, where are we?

Last week we began to see a slowdown in the rate of declining cases, though, crucially, cases were still in decline. The good news is that cases continue to decline. The seven-day averages for all five states are now well below 1,000 new cases per day, with Illinois dipping below 500. Only Pennsylvania remains above that level at 544 new cases per day.

We are no longer seeing the numbers fall by hundreds per day, most notably in New Jersey, but we remain in a race to the bottom. Unfortunately, with significant numbers of the population refusing vaccination and the near certainty of this coronavirus becoming endemic, i.e. a persistent, circulating virus, we will never reach zero. The numbers at some point will bottom out and a slowing rate of decline could indicate nearing that point.

Deaths have continued their even slower decline over the last week. New Jersey’s seven-day average fell into the high single digits for the first time since November. Virginia, which had flirted with single-digit days, has now reported a week-long run of about nine deaths per day. Delaware, due to its low population only reached double digits for most of February, but has seen a slight uptick to over two deaths per day.

The two most interesting states with regards to deaths are Illinois and Pennsylvania, for different reasons. Starting with Illinois, we are beginning to see a pattern of bottoming out. For most of the last week the seven-day average has hovered about 20 with day-to-day changes of one or two additional/fewer deaths per day. We will have to watch over the coming week whether the numbers can resume pushing downwards or if we continue to see this bottoming out.

Then we have Pennsylvania. Through the beginning of the weekend, we saw progress as the Commonwealth’s seven-day average dropped below 20 deaths per day for the first time since October. Two days ago the Department of Health reported an additional 185 deaths, but then yesterday the total number of deaths dropped by 174. I haven’t yet been able to piece together what happened, but it does make the sudden spike in the seven-day average—to 46 deaths per day—a wee bit suspect.

Finally we have vaccinations. And the news is there is no news. Over the last week we have seen almost zero growth in the number of fully vaccinated individuals in Pennsylvania (1.8 percentage points), Virginia (1.53 pts), and Illinois (2.41 pts).

Total full vaccinations in PA, VA, & IL.

If we look at where the cumulative rates remain stuck, however, we see numbers in the mid-40s, short of 2/3 the estimated herd immunity range. The flattening of the curve, indicating slowing rates of vaccination, have become increasingly pronounced. This is not the curve we want to see flattened. Ideally this slowdown would have occurred nearer the 70% range and we could have eased into the estimated herd immunity range.

That said, we are approaching 50% in these three states and numerous communities, though not all, within these states are now over 50% fully vaccinated. But the longer we have largely unvaccinated reservoirs available, the more likely it is we will see new variants emerge that could potentially evolve to be more transmissible or even more deadly.

And so for any of my readers who haven’t received their shots yet, I encourage you to please do so. They’re free, they’re effective, and they’re necessary for us to get back to some sense of normal.

Credit for the piece is mine.

Covid Update: 31 May

Last week I wrote about how new cases had maybe flattened a wee bit in their rapid drop from peaks earlier this year. But the good news is that even in where new cases declines may have slowed down, they continue to decline.

We can see the tails at the right ends are all back to declining shapes. Delaware is perhaps the most deceptive, because remember that there was the anomalous spike from late processing of earlier new cases.

I had noted that deaths had finally seen some data showing them dropping. That has held true to some degree.

Indeed, the tails at the end of each state have shown slow declines. Delaware is even near 0 deaths per day. Illinois, however, is an exception with a small increase lately.

Finally, a brief look at vaccinations.

Full vaccination curves for PA, VA, & IL.

You can see that the rate of full vaccinations has begun to slow. All three states we cover are over 40%, though all are below 45%. Pennsylvania is difficult to evaluate, however, because for the last four days Philadelphia has not updated its numbers. And as the largest county by far in the state, it’s shifts can swing the overall state numbers.

Credit for the piece is mine.

On a Line. Or Not.

Two weeks ago I was reading an article in the BBC that fact checked some of President Biden’s claims about the economy. Now I noted the other day in a post about axis lines and their use in graphics. Axis lines help ground the user in making comparisons between bars, lines, or whatever, and the minimum/maximum/intervals of the data set.

I was reading the article and first came upon this graphic. It’s nothing crazy and shows job growth in the aggregate for the first three months of a presidential administration. A pretty neat comparison in the combination of the data. I like.

Pay attention to what you see here. There will be a quiz.

I don’t like the lack of grid lines for the axis, however. But, okay, none to be found.

I keep reading the article. And then a couple of paragraphs later I come upon this graphic. It looks at the monthly figures and uses a benchmark line, the red dotted one, to break out those after January 2021 when Biden took office.

But do you notice anything?

The lines for the y-axis are back!

The article had a third graphic that also included axis lines.

I don’t have a lot to say about these graphics in particular, but the most important thing is to try and be consistent. I understand the need to experiment with styles as a brand evolves. Swap out the colours, change the styles of the lines, try a new typeface. (Except for the blue, we are seeing different colours and typefaces here, but that’s not what I want to write about.)

First, I don’t know if these are necessarily style experiments. I suspect not, but let’s be charitable for the sake of argument. I would refrain from experimenting within a single article. In other words, use the lines or don’t, but be consistent within the article.

For the record, I think they should use the lines.

Another point I want to make is with the third graphic. You’ll note that, like I said above, it does use axis lines. But that’s not what I want to mention.

Instead I want to look at the labelling on the axes. Let’s start with the y-axis, the percentage change in GDP on the previous quarter. The top of the chart we have 30%. As I’ve said before, you can see in the Trump administration, the bar for the initial Covid-19 rebound rises above the 30% line. It’s not excessive, I can buy it if you’re selling it.

But let’s go down below the 0-line. Just prior to the rebound we had the crash. Similarly, this extends just below the -30% line. But here we have a big space and then a heavy black line below that -30% line. It looks like the bottom line should be -40%, but scanning over to the left and there is no label. So what’s going on?

First, that heavy black line, why does it appear the same as the baseline or zero-growth line? The axis lines, by comparison, are thin and grey. You use a heavier, darker line to signify the breaking point or division between, in this case, positive and negative growth. Theoretically, you don’t need the two different colours for positive and negative growth, because the direction of the bar above/below that black line encodes that value. By making the bottom line the same style as the baseline, you conflate the meaning of the two lines, especially since there is no labelling for the bottom line to tell you what the line means.

Second, the heaviness of the line draws visual attention to it and away from the baseline, especially since the bottom line has the white space above it from the -30% line. Consider here the necessity of this line. For the 30% line that sets the maximum value of the y-axis, we have the blue bar rising above the line and the administration labels sit nicely above that line. There is no reason the x-axis labels could not exist in a similar fashion below the -30% line. If anything, this is an inconsistency within the one chart, let alone the one graphic.

Third, is it -40%? I contend the line isn’t necessary and that if the blue bar pokes above the 30% line, the orange bar should poke below the -30% line. But, if the designer wants to use a line below the -30% line, it should be labelled.

Finally, look at the x-axis. This is more of a minor quibble, but while we’re here…. Look at the intervals of the years. 2012, 2014, 2016, every two years. Good, make sense. 2018. 20…21? Suddenly we jump from every two years to a three-year interval. I understand it to a point, after all, who doesn’t want to forget 2020. But in all seriousness, the chart ends at 2021 and you cannot divide that evenly. So what is a designer to do? If this chart had less space on the x-axis and the years were more compressed in terms of their spacing, I probably wouldn’t bring this up.

However, we have space here. If we kept to a two-year interval system, I would introduce the labels as 2012, but then contract them with an apostrophe after that point. For example, 2014 becomes ’14. By doing that, you should be able to fit the two-year intervals in the space as well as the ending year of the data set.

Overall, I have to say that this piece shocked me. The lack of attention to detail, the inconsistency, the clumsiness of the design and presentation. I would expect this from a lesser oganisation than the BBC, which for years had been doing solid, quality work.

The first chart is conceptually solid. If Biden spoke about job creation in the first three months of the administration vs. his predecessor, aggregate the data and show it that way. But the presentation throughout this piece does that story a disservice. I wish I knew what was going on.

Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.

Covid Update: 23 May

Last week I wrote about how we were seeing new cases continuing to rapidly decline. This week we can say cases are still declining, but perhaps a bit less rapidly than earlier.

The charts above show that slowdown in the tail at the right of the chart. First some points to note, Delaware reported that several hundred cases had not been entered into their database, and so we saw a one-time spike midweek. But note that after the spike, the numbers continue to trend down. In other words, the rapid decline was probably a bit less rapid than we saw, but it was still a decline.

Pennsylvania’s chart has a problem of your author’s own design. Now that I’m fully vaccinated I was able to leave the flat this weekend and the Pennsylvania data wasn’t ready by the time I left on Saturday. But by the Sunday data, it was and so the 2500 new cases is probably split somehow between those days—accounted for by the seven-day average. This points to a broader question for which I do not yet have an answer: as life increasingly returns to normal, how much longer will I continue to update these charts?

I started these graphics as a way for myself to track the spread of the virus in my home state and the state where I still have a large number of friends. At the time, there were few if any visualisations out there doing this. Now most media outlets have them and my work at home led to a similar project at work. The reason I continued to make these was you, my readers here and in other places where I post this work. Your comments, messages, texts, and emails made it clear you valued the work. First, I know there are still many people left to be fully vaccinated, nearly half the population, and due to bias, some of the people most likely to follow these posts are those most likely to get vaccinated as early as possible. But please let me know, readers, if you’re still getting value out of these graphics.

But back to the data, in two of the remaining three states, Virginia and Illinois, we saw numbers continue to decline. New Jersey, however, shows a tail with a slight uptick in the seven-day average of new cases. This will be something I follow closely this coming week.

Deaths finally appear to be dropping.

Not by large numbers, no, but in Virginia and Illinois we saw declines of 5 deaths per day. Pennsylvania was even greater with a decline of 7. We are still above rates we saw last summer, but it does appear that finally we have hit the inflection point we have been waiting for the last several weeks.

Finally we have vaccinations. These charts look at the cumulative number of people fully vaccinated.

Fully vaccinated curves for PA, VA, & IL.

And in that the number keeps going up, and that’s good. But they can also only keep going up. But if you look closely at the right tail of the curve, you begin to see it flattening out as the rate of daily vaccinations begins to drop. Unfortunately we’re well below levels we think we’d need for herd immunity. But, to try and look at the positive, we’re almost halfway there and that is certainly playing a role as we can see with the rapid decline in numbers of new cases. But we need to keep trying to get more people vaccinated.

Credit for the piece is mine.

Some Data on Deaths in Gaza and Israel

I’ve seen an uptick in traffic to the blog the last few days, specifically my older content on the Middle East. I don’t exactly have the bandwidth to track the conflict between Israel and Gaza in addition to Covid-19 and my other projects. But as we approached the ten-day mark since Hamas first fired rockets into Israel, I wanted to get a sense of the death toll and so here we are.

The biggest thing to note is that we should take all this data with a grain of salt. For example, the Israeli Defence Force will likely talk up the effectiveness of its Iron Dome air defence system and downplay total civilian deaths. Conversely, Hamas will likely talk up civilian deaths while not detailing at all the deaths of its fighters. And when it comes to deaths in Gaza, it’s not clear what share of those reported by civilian authorities, i.e. the hospital systems, are militant fighters vs. civilians.

Not at all covered by any of this is a discussion of the opportunity costs involved, particularly when it comes to Israeli air strikes. For example, if a Gaza household contains a known Hamas fighter, one can certainly regret an Israeli drone strike that kills the fighter and his non-combatant son whilst in a field. But that strike may be a better outcome than striking the fighter’s home and along with killing not just him and his son, but now his wife, daughters, and the rest of his family.

Credit for the piece is mine.

Covid Update: 16 May

Last week I wrote about how new cases in the five states we cover (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Illinois) were falling and falling rapidly. And this week that pattern continues to hold.

If we look at the Sunday-to-Sunday numbers, daily new cases were down in all five states. If we look at the seven-day averages, cases are down in all states. Pennsylvania and Illinois are now down below 2000 new cases per day, Virginia is just over 500 per day, New Jersey is below 400, and Delaware is over 100. These are all levels we last saw last autumn. In other words, we’re not quite back to summer levels of low transmission, but this time next month, I wouldn’t be surprised if we were.

Deaths remain stubbornly resistant to falling.

In fact, if we compare the Sunday-to-Sunday numbers we see that the numbers yesterday were largely the same as last Sunday, except in Pennsylvania where they were up significantly. The seven-day average?

Here’s where it gets interesting, because deaths are up slightly. Not by much, for example, Illinois was at 29.1 deaths per day last Sunday, this Sunday? 30.9. Illinois isn’t alone. Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia all have reported slight upticks in their death rates.

But the biggest concern is the continuing slowdown in vaccinations. We’re perhaps halfway to the point of herd immunity in the three states we track. All three are between 37% and 38%. The thing to track this coming week will be if the rate continues to slow.

Total full vaccination curves for PA, VA, & IL.

Credit for the piece is mine.