I've been working on a series of neighbourhood-level #COVID19 #Canada visualizations to track the incidence of the virus in some of Canada’s largest cities. @CoulSim has #Montreal covered, so I started with #Toronto. My progress so far. Thread🧵⬇️
By now, we are all aware of the exponential growth of cases in #Ontario in the last few weeks. This is not restricted to #Toronto, but the city certainly led the pack.
Percent change in 7-day rolling average of cases compared to one week ago:
Ontario: +74.3% 📈 (188.6/day ➡️ 328.7/day)
Toronto: +63.3% 📈 (61.9/day ➡️ 101.0/day)
It has been widely reported that the #COVID19 pandemic has not impacted Toronto's residents equitably. This much is evident from the map of cumulative cases per 100,000.
The city’s northwest corner, home to many of the city’s most disadvantages residents, has been particularly hard hit, as reported earlier in the summer by @jyangstar, @katecallen, and others in @TorontoStar.
thestar.com/news/gta/2020/…
The recent resurgence in cases looks a little different. We know it’s being driven by young people. Here’s an animation of weekly new cases per 100,000 from August 17 to September 14.
You’ll notice Toronto’s Waterfront district light up in the most recent week of data. This isn’t surprising. It’s a young area.
cbc.ca/news/canada/to…
"You hear anecdotally, it's because people in that age bracket are less scared and they're not taking the precautions that other age groups are taking," said @AshTuite, an epidemiologist at the @UofT @UofT_dlsph.
Human behaviour is at the root of this resurgence. @deonandan makes this point as forcefully as anyone:
And @ASPphysician makes this point more eloquently than I could in his most recent (excellent) newsletter:
us17.campaign-archive.com/?u=448e03fc822…
Make no mistake: this “casedemic”—as some have taken to calling it—has consequences, and we are already feeling them.
The best way to prevent outbreaks in nursing homes (or schools, for that matter, or workplaces...) is to control transmission in the community.
"This is NOT a blip," warns @SharkawyMD.
Cases are an early signal, a warning. Hospitalizations lag infections by several weeks or months, especially if young people are the vanguard.
nationalpost.com/news/canada/th…
As pithily summarized by @DFisman: "If you’re reacting to hospitalizations, you've missed the boat."
This animation was produced using the awesome Toronto neighbourhood dataset by @TOPublicHealth, extracted once per week on Mondays and uploaded by Wednesday. This is why the dataset only includes cases up to September 14.
open.toronto.ca/dataset/covid-…
In the meantime, you can follow the COVID-19 Canada Open Data Working Group here:
opencovid.ca
Get our #OpenData here:
github.com/ishaberry/Covi…
opencovid.ca/api/
Find more maps and trends:
art-bd.shinyapps.io/covid19canada/
Post-script: I spent a good chunk of time this weekend adding more #COVID19 #Canada government data to my automatic archival tool. I'm up to almost 100 files per day! Why is this important? ⬇️🧵
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