A time to draw down the COVID Project…

It’s time to draw this COVID tracking project to an end or at least drastically slow down the pace of updates. I’ve been publishing up to 1500 time-series and exploratory data based charts per day, several times a week, over the past 14 months. The COVID pandemic is increasingly in our past. Most people seem to be moving on and past the pandemic. Daily views on any of these charts are minimal. There are plenty of other official health agency and news sites who have greater resources and time to publish such data.

I’ve been reluctant to draw down the pace of updates, mostly because I’ve invested a lot of time to developing and publishing this work. And doing so requires me to juggle and adjust numerous supporting files in the background. Most days, it is an ordered and choreographed dance between many files, followed by lengthy wait times to manually upload upwards of 1500 charts per update. Each chart is roughly 400 KB. Upload data rates on most web sites are much slower than download data rates.

Although I took this on as a chance to challenge myself in working with large datasets and seeing what they told me, and to further work on data presentation techniques, the project has grown too large to maintain efficiently. Data sources, though mostly stable from the variety of sources I obtain the data from, is increasingly becoming erratic as individual states quit updating their data on a daily basis. This leads to weekly or less updates which lead to abrupt changes in a number of time-series charts dependent on daily data counts. It is time to throw in the towel and move on.

I may occasionally update some of the charts in the archive, but I’m no longer promising regular updates. I’ve moved most of the links to the litterrocks site’s secondary navigation links on the lower left hand side of most pages.

I’ve had a long time interest in data graphics in many fields and those interests continue. For the past year, the COVID topic has dominated the selection of data to explore and it has been both a great learning experience and fun. But this larger litterrocks site was developed and designed originally to host both my photographic and data design work and I’ve neglected the photographic work for over a year. Photography remains my primary work and practice, and the time has come to focus more on that for this site.

David Blackwell
litterrocks.com
Seattle WA