Having broken my personal promise to not work with COVID data1, I decided to revisit the subject after seeing a recent project from Nathan Yau. Yau was looking at OpenTable reservations, and made a clean & well-annotated plot with panels for each state. The OpenTable dataset tracks the difference between seated dining on a given day between 2019 and 2020. Plotting these differences over time gives a view into how quickly people are returning to more regular consumption patterns. Read more

So, this is my first post in a while. I changed jobs in January, and moved back across the country to my hometown of Boise, ID. I was hoping that my first post-move update would be more uplifting, but by mid-March, I didn’t want to write anything, for a variety of reasons. As a person whose job involves cleaning and analyzing data, the pandemic has been surreal– public health, statistical methods, and data visualizations are now daily topics, for basically everyone I talk to. Read more