User:Mporter/Covid data

I am dissatisfied with the available resources regarding the pandemic. There's plenty of information, it's a matter of finding it and comprehending it.

2023 POSTSCRIPT
It's now the end of March 2023; six months since I last edited this page. The world has mostly moved on; in my case, it's the rise of "GPT" AI that occupies attention now.

However, something made me think of checking on my old sources of Covid data. My main source was always worldometers.info. So I went to their main Covid page - and spotted something peculiar: in their graph of "daily new cases", there was no spike at the start of 2023, even though there must have been millions of cases in China. In fact, they say there's only been 500,000 Covid cases in China since the pandemic started. The most recent update to that total was January 9 and linked to China's CDC...

Then I tried the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Centre, which I learned about only late in the pandemic, and which I never used much. They stopped collecting data on 10 March 2023. As with Worldometers, their graph of new cases showed nothing much happening at the end of 2022 and start of 2023, again failing to show the Chinese outbreak from that time.

I decided to check the World Health Organization, which turns out to have a COVID-19 Dashboard - and here, finally, I found something resembling reality. In "Situation by Country, Territory or Area", for China it currently says 99,238,143 confirmed cases, essentially all coming at the end of 2022.

Description and causal explanation
Things I would like to be able to do:

View a timeline of active cases worldwide, in which you could see how many there were in each world region. (Worldometers allows one to see the history of worldwide active cases, and - on national information pages - the history of active cases within each country.)

View a timeline of countermeasures, again classified by world region. These might include: lockdowns, travel/border restrictions, other public health measures (e.g. masks, social distancing), and ultimately, vaccination programs.

I would also be interested in histories of the spread, of new variants, of manufacture and distribution of vaccines. Also economic and political effects (political effects I believe would mostly be events, like political changes; macroeconomic effects might be trends).

I would also like to have causal explanations for everything in these timelines. For example, epidemiological equations which explain the variations in worldwide spread, and in effectiveness of countermeasures, in terms of variables whose values differ between world regions.

What comes next, what should be done next, what could have been done
This is more complicated. I am tempted by various ideas according to which fighting the pandemic could have been done with a less heavy hand, e.g. vitamin D to fortify immune systems, and 'focused protection'. But in the end the world has gone for society-wide lockdowns and restrictions, and mass vaccination programs.

The path back to normality for any country consists of controlling the spread of the virus within the country, and controlling the entry of the virus into the country. Once these are achieved, such countries can then think of opening up to each other (e.g. Australia-New Zealand travel bubble, Singapore-Hong Kong travel bubble).

Detailed workings of the virus and the vaccines
This whole experience is propelling us further into a biotech age. Understanding the virus's impact on the body involves understanding molecular events in numerous bodily systems, while the mRNA vaccines, in particular, are a remarkable example of biohacking that may be a prototype for many other kinds of localized genetic modification of tissues (the virus-based vaccines are relevant here too).

Links

 * Worldometer: cases and deaths in each country
 * JHU on covid
 * COMPREHENSIVE LIST OF VACCINES APPROVED IN EACH COUNTRY
 * Vaccines used in various countries .. countries from most regions, but omits those which are relying on Chinese vaccines
 * China and COVAX .. I wanted to link to a page at CGTN but Wikipedia won't permit this .. the url is https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-04-26/Chinese-COVID-19-vaccines-in-last-phase-to-join-COVAX-ZKlpQ8E5mo/index.html
 * Portal:COVID-19
 * Wikipedia templates for COVID-19 .. I would like for there to be a standard way to describe a country's vaccination program, and a way to aggregate all that information on a single page