1. Given the COVID-19 statistical data which can be found at the links shown below, create an interactive visualisation that shows the evolution of the pandemic in a specific country and also globally. Show daily new cases, daily new deaths, average for previous 3 and 7 days as well as cumulative values. Allow for the user to be able to select the country they want to see, and additionally which values. Show the data on a map as well.
See the following for an explanation of the data fields:
https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/tree/master/csse_covid_19_data
2. Create a visualisation of the top 5 countries in terms of number of infections for a particular user-selected date. Sort the countries from high to low number of infections in the chart. Bonus: create an animation of multiple days to show how the top 5 change in time. This is also known as a bar chart race.
3. Using the data above and any other data that you need, try to answer the following questions:
a. What degree of lag is required to get the best correlation between new case count and new death count? How much does this lag vary from location to location? Has the current degree of lag changed relative to the first wave of infection?
b. Using the optimum lag to compute the case fatality rate (CFR), determine how the CFR has changed over time in your location and/or others.
c. How strongly, if at all, is the infection rate (infections per 1M population) correlated with local or regional population density? Is the degree of correlation steady over time or does it differ across the different waves of the pandemic?
4. Creating accurate predictions for the evolution of the pandemic has been a challenging task. By leaving out the last two weeks of data, use the rest of the data to devise a method for predicting new case trends for the country of your choice and predict for the weeks that you've left out. Are your predictions close to the real data? Use your predictive method to calculate the evolution of new cases for the next 30 days. Plot your results.
5. Explore the effect of COVID-19 on the mortality rate compared to previous years. The US data can be downloaded from https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html, or use the data for your country instead if it is available. Does COVID explain all of the excess deaths in 2020 relative to prior years? If not, can you find data supporting an explanation for any difference between COVID deaths and overall excess deaths?
