FAQ

Where is your data from?

Like everyone else, we are very grateful to the Johns Hopkins University CSSE team for making their data publically available. https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19 Global population data are 2020 "medium" estimates from the UN, and US populations are 2019 estimates from the US Census Bureau. We've made many of the cleaned up tables we used available in Github.

How frequently is this updated?

We rebuild the site every two hours on the hour. A build takes about 6 minutes so if you check the site at say 10 minutes past the hour you should have the latest data.

Where did you get the active cases number?

That's the total new cases in the past 14 days. We decided on 14 days because our friends who have had COVID-19 (they're OK!) were sick for about two weeks. Also 14 days is the length of time people with COVID-19 are often asked to self quarantine.

How are you calculating whether cases are increasing, decreasing, or staying the same?

We calculate it from daily new cases on the last nine days in an area. Since testing isn't reported evenly, we average three groups of three days. Then we fit a weighted line through the data, putting more emphasis on recent data. If the slope is increasing, that means the number of new cases is increasing and COVID-19 transmission in the area is getting worse. If it's decreasing, new cases are dereasing and things are looking up. Often it's pretty flat and we don't want to mislead you so we say it's about the same.

Why did you make this site?

The ability to know what's happening near the people we love.
The ability to bookmark a location - our homes, our parent's homes, our friends workplaces.
The ability to know metrics which people aren't posting yet like the death metrics (why is Italy so much higher?) and the recovery metrics (Seattle has a lot of cases but the recovery percentages are pretty good)

Who are you?

There are two of us who built this. Our bios are on the About page.

I think I found an error, what do I do?

Yep. We've probably seen it too. We might fix it at some point, but the relentless exponential march of COVID-19 makes today's data more important than yesterday's. There are two types of errors that you'll find here:

XYZ Broke aka We were stooopid. Software engineers make bugs and we are no exceptions.
Data are Wrong. We are only as good as the Hopkins data and the Hopkins data does have some issues (there are typos like "Wetchester") but they have done a great job and we appreciate what they have done. Go Hopkins!

Is This Free?

Yep. We wanted it and you get it too.

Am I Tracked?

Nope. All we do is count site hits. It makes us happy and motivated to see people using the page.

What's the Commercial Play Here?

Yep. I wanted this for myself but we aren't 100% charitable here. We have a side project going around Machine Learning labeling, NetLabeler and we took time away from that to build this. If you have any interest in Machine Learning labeling (and you likely don't and that's ok) then please signup for our mailing list on our About page