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by mattlutze 2277 days ago
Here, I would recommend that mortality rates are not bad. The goal in risk communication is to instill a level of concern equal to the current threat. It's all about context.

If you show infection, death and recovery rates, you have to provide context and help people understand what a thing means.

1-10 scales can make parsing difficult (3 and 4 have the same description right now, for example). Governments, militaries and emergency aid orgs put a lot of effort into color and coding systems.

Give Peter Sandman a Google, and check out his site here:

https://www.psandman.com/

He's an expert in how to talk about scary, hard-to-visualize things (like a viral pandemic).

Also, how old is the data being drawn from, what algorithm do you use to de-conflict the sources, and how do you disclose this to your audience (other than the general about page)? If a source has different refresh rates for countries that it tracks, how are you reflecting that to your audience?

A note, China is missing from your nifty "First 20 days" graph, which maybe you should just call "First 20 days after 200 cases" or something like this to make it clearer what's being tracked.