- A tool lets you see how different researchers project the future of the US's coronavirus outbreak.
- Because projections change frequently, the tool shows how models' predictions have changed throughout the course of the outbreak.
- Users can search by state or get a national snapshot, and can also sort by categories including hospital bed capacity, daily deaths, cumulative cases, and more.
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By now you're familiar with "the curve" — the data visualization of how quickly the
Not all curves are the same, of course: A steeper curve means many new people are getting infected in a short period of time, while a flattened curve depends on effective social distancing.
A website created by data scientist David Yu lets you compare two prominent research centers' models of the outbreak — the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and the Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) — alongside the reality of the coronavirus.
You can check it out here.
Users can see how projections have changed over time as researchers updated the models with new information. Projections of total cases and deaths, for example, went down when states issued stay-at-home orders last month but have jumped again as the rules lifted.
Visualizing the national coronavirus outbreak
The model-comparison tool plots the different projections as colored lines on top of a grey bar chart of real, past data about the virus.
You can sort by the cumulative number of cases, the number of new cases per day, the daily number of deaths, the number of ICU beds used, the number of ventilators used, total hospital admissions, all beds used, and more.
There is an option to see these factors on a nationwide basis, or you can search by state.
Below is the curve of the US's daily deaths.
This particular curve only shows the IHME's projections because LANL only did state-by-state projections. In addition, some of the categories — ICU beds and daily cases — were only researched by one of the teams, so only projections from that team show up.
This curve starts climbing at the end of March, and the projections mostly go through early June. (None of the projections currently go past the end of the summer.)
You can hover over a particular day to find out the specific numbers and compare them to what was projected.
The IHME's projections from May 1 — the darkest, highest line on the graph — predicted that the peak in US deaths would come May 2, with 2,276 deaths recorded that day.
The IHME's projections from April 16 — the teal line in the middle of the chart — predicted that the peak in deaths would be on April 17, with 2,210.
These projections were both too low: On May 1, the US reported a total of 2,909 coronavirus-related deaths.
Because the projections have been updated over time and the data used to create them has changed frequently, the updated projections are plotted on the graph.
Comparing two models for one state
To see how the projections have changed overtime in one state, take daily deaths in Alabama.
LANL's model, which was updated on May 3, predicted that the peak in the state's number of daily deaths would come on May 4 with 10 deaths, and then state would see another 10 deaths every day until May 14.
The IHME's projection on April 7 suggested that daily deaths would peak April 22 at 27 deaths. That modeling was updated on May 1, however, and now projects that the state's daily death toll will peak on June 29 with 29 deaths.
A major factor in this shift might be that Alabama lifted its stay-at-home order on April 30, which will likely allow the virus to spread again more easily in the state.
Models aren't concrete predictions of the future — they're complex calculations of potential scenarios that can help scientists, officials, and the public prepare. Health authorities can build up hospital ICU capacity, for example, and procure more ventilators if they anticipate higher need.
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