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A comment on Show HN: Log-Scale Covid-19 Plots. Parent comment

Re:Show HN: Log-Scale Covid-19 Plots by em500 on Saturday April 04, 2020 @03:43AM (#22776864)
One reason is that daily increases are very volatile/noisy. The standard way to handle this is to use n-day moving averages, but they have a time lag and are harder to interpret.

Financial Times has the best graphical trackers I've seen. They used to show cumulative counts, but switched to 7-day moving averages of daily increases" recently.

https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest

I agree that displaying increases/growth rates are more informative overall, but it does take more time to understand the metrics. (Just compare the descriptions: "Total Deaths" vs "7-day moving average of daily increase in Total Deaths")

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Re:Show HN: Log-Scale Covid-19 Plots by computerphysics on Saturday April 04, 2020 @04:10AM (#22776931)
Not really. Data for Spain can be perfectly used and fit without averages on daily increases => https://media-exp1.licdn.com/dms/image/C5622AQH1JmaVMs3mqQ/f...
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Re:Show HN: Log-Scale Covid-19 Plots by em500 on Saturday April 04, 2020 @06:50AM (#22777507)
It's unclear what that graph is supposed to show. It can't be cumulative cases (because there are days with decreases), but the scales are completely off if they're supposed to show daily increases/diffs (Spain certainly did not see daily increases anywhere near 100k in the past few days).
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Re:Show HN: Log-Scale Covid-19 Plots by jacobush on Saturday April 04, 2020 @07:09AM (#22777574)
On the other hand I don't understand how bad it is from looking at the graph with the easy to understand metric.
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