Swine Flu Tracking Charts

This is an old update, to find the latest update click on the "Latest Swine Flu Tracking Chart" on the top of the menu on the right.

I am putting together some time series charts to track the swine flu. I thought it would be interesting to plot some key indicators as this progresses. I will try to update these charts as much as the data changes (probably every couple of days but daily if need be) so please come back or subscribe to see them progress.



Confirmed Swine Flu Cases:

This is a plot of the confirmed U.S. and confirmed total global cases. (click on this or any plot for a larger view) The CDC and WHO has really just got these updates going in the last few days. I am not bothering with suspected or related cases, only confirmed cases. At this point, that is the only number we can really believe. I plotted this out to the end of May and I gave it some headroom up to 500 because my official forecast is that the confirmed cases will skyrocket soon at this point (like easily be to 300 hundred within a week or so) as we just start to get people aware of this I am sure there will hundreds of samples by the day being sent for testing for the virus. I am thinking the scaling on the y-axis here will need to be logarithmic if we really see this spread but I will wait and see.



Yahoo News Count:

I am not only interested in the number of actual cases of swine flu but also the public and press response to it. Since much of the impact of this is likely to be driven by the mass behavioral dynamics I think it will be useful to track the spread of the interest of swine flu by various ways. One that I have tracked in the past and that I think is a good measure is to count the number of news stories that show up in Yahoo's news search. This shows the number of news items containing the phrase "swine flu" each day. Notice how quick it took off from around zero to near 20,000 on April 26th. I am quite sure log scaling will be appropriate here but I will keep it linear for now. My forecast is for this to be exponentially increasing at this point, like probably nearly doubling each day for at least the next few days.



Google Trends Search Volume:

Google trends is another cool way to track the spread of interest in the swine flu. In google trends you can look at the search volume for any word or words. Here I also searched for "swine flu" to see the search volume for it. Google trends only allows you to export by week so the data here is not as detailed as above but this should look more interesting as things progress.



Here are a couple other cool links for watching the swine flu: This one, is a google map which is updated with all the cases on a map. And this site, http://trancy.net/h1n1/ is tracking all the press releases and updates on a timeline.

Disclaimer: I hope I am not coming across as alarmist, in fact, my gut says this will not turn out to be the epidemic we have been hearing alot about lately. I hope that is the case. But either way, I wanted to see it progress via some charts like this which will also be useful in understanding when it has passed.



Let me know what you think, any recommendations on my charts or other things you think I should add to this to track? Comment or email and let me know.