COVID-19 Population Data

COVID-19 - Population Data

The COVID map is based on the same data used in the Johns Hopkins World Map.

However, their data only contains populations for US counties, the data for countries and territories came from other sources. Unfortunately, sources don't agree on what the populations are. Many of these indicate that their numbers are modeled, some indicate 2020 (obvious models) others provide a different date. So, bottom line, all population numbers should be considered approximate - so use caution.

The basic reason to get this data is to display the reported COVID-19 data as per 100,000 people.

Using Population Data | Site Information Display | Graphs | Animation Control | Data sources

Using Population Data

Checkboxes are provided on the following tabs to present results as per 100,000.

Animation - this controls the marker colors
Aggregate Plots
Individual Plots

In a future release, there will be a way to display the populations on a heatmap. Since this covers 7 orders of magnitude, a logarithmic coding will be needed.

Site Information Display

The Site Info tab displays information about either

The marker currently under the mouse cursor, or
When Live update is off, the last site clicked

Population is one of the fields.

Below the 3 Cases fields are the per 100,000 values for each.

Since a few sites don't have population data, that is indicated and the per 100,000 fields are left empty.

Graphs

The tabs for each graph have a checkbox to selecting per 100,000. This provides a good way to compare various sites (countries, states, counties).

In the Aggregate Plots, the populations of all the selected sites are added to produce a result. However, as noted above, some sites do not have population data. If one of those is in the selected group, then the graph simply displays cumulative counts. (Same for the Individual Plots, if there is no population data, then the cumulative data is shown.)

Mainly for the Aggregate Plots, you can use the Population filter (on the Filters tab) to remove all sites with less than zero population. Actually, since none of the sites have under 100 people, any value in a reasonable range will work. (The default is 20, and that works fine.)

Note: When Population is selected, the slope max min change options are ignored.

Animation Control

On the Animations tab, there are 2 related checkboxes.

Display data as per 100,000
Hide sites that have no population data

To be clear, the second checkbox only hides the markers - it does not change the selection. As a result, it has no effect on the aggregate plots. To get an Aggregate Plot of per 100,000 data, the sites without population must be deselected, not simply hidden. (I might change this.)

In addition, the sites are only hidden in one of the heatmap modes - in the Selections mode (on the Color Keys tab), all the non-filtered sites are displayed.

Data sources

The COVID map is based on the same data used in the Johns Hopkins World Map. Their data is provided as 5 files and only the US deaths file contains population data - presented as per US county.

The per US State data used in the application is computed from the provided per US county data.

Most of the global country population data comes from the World Population Review site - mainly because it is available as a json file.

The population data for Canadian and Australian states comes from another location in the World Population Review and the Austrailian government. Several additional values were found in wikipedia.

The Chinese population data comes from City Population, not because it is the best, but because it was the easiest (for me) to understand and because it matched the names in the Johns Hopkins data. Several other data sources mixed cities with provinces and it wasn't clear if I needed to add their populations to the provinces or not. (Simplicity rules) That said, I don't think that any population data is particularly reliable, for instance

Province	World Population Review	World Atlas	City Population
Hong Kong	7,496,981	7,061,200	-
Macau	649,335	552,503	-
Hubei	-	57,237,740	59,170,000
China	1,439,323,776	-	1,395,380,000

Note that the City Population totals for China don't match.

 1,395,380,000  Given on their web page
 1,396,530,000  Actual when the values are summed in a spreadsheet

Of course, it is likely that population data from any source is just as unreliable and, based on this, I don't trust any source. It is also why I prefer to get all the data from a single source - at least the assumptions, biases, and methodology will be similar and the comparisons will be more likely to be useful.

As of 05-04-20, the only remaining missing values are for a few ships and Gaza/West Bank.

Author: Robert Clemenzi