I was on a call with a bunch of data journalists last month where we discussed our ...surprise... that Johns Hopkins used Worldometers as a source for its Covid data
🔢🔄👀🤔
It’s kinda mad that so many kept using their numbers given the complete opacity edition.cnn.com/interactive/20…
🔢🔄👀🤔
It’s kinda mad that so many kept using their numbers given the complete opacity edition.cnn.com/interactive/20…
Early on, we were using Worldometers for some of our sourcing, but stopped in early April after @MaxCRoser drew attention to their unreliability and complete lack of transparency
Whole books could be written on the Wild West that is Covid data
• Weeks-long backlogs of deaths or cases being casually attributed to a single day
• Countries’ definitions changing abruptly, leading to people rising from the dead
• Fat-finger mistakes quadrupling death tolls
• Weeks-long backlogs of deaths or cases being casually attributed to a single day
• Countries’ definitions changing abruptly, leading to people rising from the dead
• Fat-finger mistakes quadrupling death tolls
Updating the trajectory charts is a great demo of dataviz as fact-checking tool
"Data done, how does it look when we plot it?"
"Ah, 3 countries resurrected people, one went from averaging 3 deaths to 100, one vanished"
Far easier to spot weirdness in a chart than a spreadsheet
"Data done, how does it look when we plot it?"
"Ah, 3 countries resurrected people, one went from averaging 3 deaths to 100, one vanished"
Far easier to spot weirdness in a chart than a spreadsheet
