Butte Lab - Douglas Arneson, Paul Bleicher, Atul Butte, Matthew Elliot, Arman Mosenia, Boris Oskotsky, Vivek Rudrapatna, Rohit Vashisht and Travis Zack

Their group has been developing a data visualization app to help all of us better understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic at the local level. In collaboration with Paul Bleicher, MD PhD and former CEO of OptumLabs, we rapidly developed and deployed a new web app for the public:  CovidCounties.org. Their app features plots of total cases and deaths by county, with customizable views for real-time, interactive exploration to compare both counties and states. It also offers options to normalize by population size and rescale by time after the first 10 cases.

What did we learn? Much more than we can say here, but here are three findings:

1) The COVID-19 pandemic has spread to an overwhelming majority of counties in the US. 2) NYC has the highest new case rate but is about average when considering its large population. There are early signs that the rate of new cases there is starting to slow down. 3) LA and SF are currently doubling cases every 3 and 4 days respectively.

Future features may include looking at the impacts of policies like shelter-in-place on case rates, comparisons with other international cities who may be ahead of us from an infection dynamics standpoint, and predictive models involving time to peak and anticipated hospitalization/ICU use.