A list of helpful SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 links

An organized resource list to check out

Photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash

Keeping track of the outbreak

Coronavirus Tracked by the Financial Times. The source of those cool ‘Number of days since 10th death’ by country (to get a comparative picture of doubling rates, points at which lockdowns were initiated) as well as a table of charts detailing countries from Algeria to Uruguay, some 43 countries in total.
Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU). Hard to believe it was only eight weeks ago I bookmarked this, tagging it ‘temporary’. What a quaint thought.
COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic Update from Worldometers. With not only maps but also a very large chart of data that is easily sortable. Very handy to compare their long list of countries by cases and deaths normalized per 1M population, to see how each country is doing relative to each other.
Why you must act now by a group of data scientists and engineers. A visual map of the US tracking which states have either limited action, social distancing, or shelter-in-place orders effective, and each state has a projected ‘flatten the curve’ chart and available hospital beds. Here’s the one for NY.
COVID Tracking Project by a group of volunteers. A painstaking effort to track the number of tests done on a state-by-state basis. As you may already know it is only by reverse-transcriptase real-time PCR and requires a high-complexity CLIA lab to perform, and the official reporting at the state level is ad-hoc and not uniform.
COVID-19 in the US and Canada by 1point3acres, a group of North American-based Chinese scientists and data scientists. Meticulous list of individual cases reported by locale (now 475 pages long) and state-by-state clickable maps down to the county level.
Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) – Statistics and Research by Max Rosen and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina at Our World in Data. A remarkable data visualization site of all sorts, from a 2-D chart testing by country comparing cases to tests run, to complete sortable tables of cases by country comparing growth rates.
Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Map by the University of Washington. Interesting data visualization by country and time (click on the ‘Situational Heatmap’.
CDC Case Reporting by the Centers for Disease Control
WHO Daily Situation Reports by the World Health Organization

How you can help and crowdsourcing projects

Exploring a project to expand hospital capacity for severe-not-critical cases of COVID-19 by Daniel Colson over Facebook. Dated March 6 2020 it was one early attempt at getting organized.
Open Source COVID19 Medical Supplies (OSCMS) is a Facebook group (open to public but approval needed to post) organized around just what their name describes – open sourcing vitally needed medical supplies. Their organizing document (‘Our intent, needs and your role’ version 1.1) is here.
COVID-19 Open Research Dataset Challenge (CORD-19) by the Allen Institute in Seattle WA. Coalition of leading research groups in AI to develop text and datamining tools, offering $1,000 prizes via Kaggle.
Mask Match by a group of volunteers. If you represent a hospital or have at least 5 N95, P95, R95 and surgical masks they match demand with supply.
#GetUsPPE by a group of healthcare workers on the front-lines. Searchable by region or state (US), they match supply of all kinds of PPE to the demand, and they even have a page for Makers (i.e. the DIY crowd). If you can sew or have a 3D printer, here’s your chance to help out.
Project N95 – The National COVID-19 Medical Equipment Clearinghouse has recently launched to match the urgent need by hospitals and healthcare systems, including nursing homes, and other care facilities, in need of personal protective equipment (PPE). Suppliers of medical equipment are invited to register.

Good reads (some very long) about the battle against SARS-CoV-2

Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now and Coronavirus: The Hammer and The Dance by Tomas Pueyo (a Silicon Valley executive and data scientist) describes the problem and the solution in great detail. Both are very long but the sources are cited and reputable.
UCSF MD Vivek Jain shares over twitter their preparation for the coming wave of urgent-care patients.
Yale Prof Nicholas Christakis shares over twitter a valuable overview, like a table of contents, that is concise and points to many of his other twitter threads topic-by-topic.
Twitter physician sharing notes a friend took at a Bay Area infectious disease conference.
Former ACA head shares a comprehensive warning over twitter on 14 March 2020, lots of expert input here along with links to other twitter threads.
A War Footing: Surfing the Curve by Joshua Gans on Medium, about the economics of this war.
Speaking of economics, Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen is a remarkable blog, and Conversations with Tyler podcast is remarkable as well.

Okay, enough for now

The response to my first two posts in a long while has been very gratifying, and I want to thank you for all the support. This has already been a remarkable year, and I believe we will get through this a stronger and better people.

Dale Yuzuki

A sales and marketing professional in the life sciences research-tools area, Dale currently is employed by Olink as their Americas Field Marketing Director. https://olink.com For additional biographical information, please see my LinkedIn profile here: http://www.linkedin.com/in/daleyuzuki and also find me on Twitter @DaleYuzuki.

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View Comments

AMac78 says:

March 26, 2020 at 2:22 pm

The Financial Times tools are excellent for visualizing the growth of the pandemic. Along the same lines are four graphs updated daily by 'Wade' at the cryptically named 91-divoc.com.