Visualising US COVID-19 Spread Graphically Using Mathematica
Graphical visualisations of data are far more accessible and intuitive to understanding than tables of numbers.
Our aim in this article is to use a graphical representation of the mainland United States and visualise how the spread of COVID-19 infections has changed over time.
A Function to Retrieve and Process the Raw Data
We’ll be using the Johns Hopkins raw data — note than the ‘MM’ and ‘dd’ denote that the months and days respectively are padded with zeros if they’re less than 10, i.e. July is ‘09’ and not ‘9’ as per the standard date and number formatting specification among popular programming languages.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/master/csse_covid_ 19_data/csse_covid_19_daily_reports_us/MM-dd-YYYY.csv
Firstly, we need to load up the raw CSV data and convert it into a Dataset for subsequent manipulation. We’ll use a simple function to convert a passed in CSV with a single header line into a Dataset,